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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

I used to do consulting and traveled 100%. The term "High Speed Internet" is a common misnomer with Hotels, and was a bane of my existence, because it typically meant > 56k but < 1 Mbps speeds.

These were with Hyatt, Marriott and Hilton hotels, mind you. If aggregaters like Hipmunk could incorporate this speed data, the way that they have with in-flight wifi, then hopefully there will be a push to improve this standard.

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Ideally I'd like for Hipmunk not only to display the speed, but also optionally include the price in the totals, so that hotels with more-expensive wifi are penalized when hotels are sorted by price. I'm going to pay for it every day anyway if I go to that hotel, so I may as well have it reflected in the total.

I thought the same thing (re: hipmunk) -- working on it!!

Gotta love HN for comments like this.

Hey Alexis - have you evolved completely from kn0thing these days? (Wow does that sound meta-physical. Haven't we all evolved from nothing?)

I find the whole 'real name online' discussion fascinating, and would love to hear your thoughts / experience. (Apologies if my google-fu has failed to produce any previous explanation on your part.)

As a fellow traveling worker, I find the same problem.

For this subset of society, wifi speed is a crucial deciding factor. Top 3, for me, at least.

Wouldn't you just get a mobile hotspot? Or are you traveling to places with poor cell reception?

Mobile hotspots are good but expensive. My wife and I have been working/living off one for the past 6 weeks and we're averaging around $100/week on internet costs even with extremely limiting our usage.

How much data are you consuming? $100 a week!!

If you are in a Virgin Mobile (Sprint) 4G area with coverage - then buy one of their hotspots (used on ebay to save $$$), $5 a day buys you all the data you can eat & it stays fast. You can connect more than 2 devices. Save $86 a week.

Alternativly, get on Verizons pre-paid plan: $45 a month for unlimited voice & text, subscribe to auto-pay & you get 1GB a month for free. You can buy an additional 3GB for $20 - you have 90 days to use up the data, the use your iphone as a hotspot.

A bit over 10Gigs a week between two people with a Verizon mifi.

Virgin would give us around 1.7gigs per week at the $5/day. It would be more expensive at our levels.

opps - looks like my $5 a day, 4G all you can eat plan is grandfathered in.

I have a Clear hotspot that costs me $55/m for 10/2 Mb and is unlimited use. The only time they've throttled me was when I watched Netflix for 8h straight.

Things like Clear are designed as home internet solutions so they have very small coverage areas. They don't work well for travelling.

I've traveled many places in the US with it. Clear's WiMax network is the basis for much of Sprint's connectivity so it's all over the place. It has worked in every US city I've tried it in.

Do you mostly travel around the East coast? Sprint seems to have pretty good coverage in the north east. Outside of that it looks like a few major market cities though.

No, I've traveled all around the US with it. West, east, midwest. It generally doesn't work well outside of cities but many small cities have towers.

Not to mention hotels like, for example, the Hyatt Santa Clara that make you pay for wifi on top of the $300-$400 per night room. It's good to see that hotelwifitest distinguishes which hotels expect you to pay for wifi.

Hyatt Santa Clara offers free hi-speed WiFi and no longer charges for WiFi access anymore. Its one of the fastest and best connections out there as this hotel was chosen by Hyatt and Cisco to be one of their innovation properties.

Very nice, thanks for the update.

My current (small) hotel has a 100 Mbit uplink. But even that becomes congested in the evening. I heard from guests who use Bittorrent, because the uplink is fast.

So a faster uplink does not mean, that you get fast internet. People are just selfish and greedy.

Traffic shaping for some definition of fairness?

They say that the traffic is shaped. But it does not feel like that. Maybe their router is just to slow to handle all those connections.

Often only the downstream is shaped; if you have lots of p2p, you might want to ensure they do traffic shaping for upstream, too.

Where's your hotel? How'd you manage to get 100Mbit uplink? :-) Most hotels I've stayed at have either Cable (if it's 3* or below), or DSL / T1 (if it's something like 3*+ Hyatt Place), and they're all ridiculously slow.

Yes, an API would be a great fit.

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