Tablets have killed free internet. I don’t need high bandwidth (e.g., video) on the road, but I do need to access my blog and email.
8 thoughts on “You Get What You Pay For”
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Tablets have killed free internet. I don’t need high bandwidth (e.g., video) on the road, but I do need to access my blog and email.
Comments are closed.
Don’t all serious road warriors have a 3g card or something similar to tether or use as a mobile hot spot?
It probably isn’t the rise of tablets that is eating the bandwidth but it surely is the use of video of the adult variety.
I call bullshit.
By which I mean, “free internet” at motels/hotels has always sucked, in my experience.
I’m willing to believe that use is up an order of magnitude in the past year – but considering how much it sucked before, I’m not sure I could tell a difference.
This is also why it’s really handy to get the 3G radio option if you get an iPad.
I figure “free internet” in most places means “you’re sharing a consumer grade connection with whoever else is on this LAN.” Meaning you may get shoddy bandwidth, or worse depending on the quality of the router used.
“…the guest room Wi-Fi networks that most hotels thought they had brought up to standard just a few years ago are now often groaning under user demands.”
Well, there’s your problem! as the Mythbusters always say… if you think you only need to upgrade bandwidth every half-decade or so, you need a lesson in Moore’s law….
Hmm, I wonder if there is an opportunity here to create easy-to-manage equipment that would make it easy for hotels to offer tiered bandwidth services for their guests. For instance, free 10 kb/s to each device and paid tiers on the order of 100 to 500 kb/s per device. I’m sure such routing equipment exists, but is it bundled into a package that a hotel without an IT staff could use.
“Tablets”? That’s at once too vague and too precise. Why didn’t they say “low cost, high performance, easy to use, portable computers”?
I guess because netbooks fail on the high performance and easy to use front.
And of course there aren’t any tablets that count for anything much, except for the iPad.
Wodun: don’t all those adult video sites use Adobe Flash, which the iPad notoriously and (near) uniquely doesn’t have?
Agree on the call of bullshit. Sucky hotel Internet predates the iProduct by a long time, and while free hotel Internet does suck, paid hotel Internet is at best only slightly worse.
I’d be willing to pay more for a connection that’s as good as what I have at home, but “more” still doesn’t extend to the pro-rata cost of a dedicated T1 for the room, which is what the lower end of paid Internet services tends to run these days. Until hotels start offering less expensive paid access that’s actually better than what I can get included with a room elsewhere, I go by past experience — unbundled Internet is a sign that the management expects customers to just pass the bill to their employers, not an indication of money being spent on providing a quality connection.
one of the really sweet things about the 3G iPad is that the 3G plan is no-contract, so it’s easy to avoid the hotel crapnet if you want.