Checking In on Hotel WiFi!

Over on my other blogs, VoIPWatch and Working Anywhere, I’ve cross posted on the subject of the annual Hotel Chatter Best and Worst of Hotel WiFi. It’s a subject that I’m very much passionate about, as I have spent over 300 days in hotels in 2008 and roughly 250 nights away in 2009. 2010 was supposed to be much lower, but I’m tracking at about 200 right now. So much for cutting back on anything but buying more netbooks this year!

Anyway. The Hotel Chatter report is a great read. From my perspective it’s also very accurate. Right now I grade Hotel Broadband on speed and more important, latency. If I can’t make a VoIP call over Skype or Truphone the hotel never gets my business a second time, if I can help it. You see, I make extensive use the services of another one of my client’s. HiDefConferencing from Citrix Online as the collaboration aspects of running a growing communications agency that focuses on IP based communications and collaboration means I have to eat our clients own dog-food as well as their finest Gold Standard service levels. Now with video conferencing also becoming a staple in my daily diet of communications either over Skype or using CounterPath’s Bria for SIP based H.264 video, solid, low latency hotel WiFi is an essential.

Then you have the emerging standard of HTML5 on the fastest selling mobile phone of all time, the iPhone, and of course the new iPad. That means more video content has to be downloaded. So, while that’s great news for Cisco, its bad new for hotel operators. They need to UPGRADE both their bandwidth and their in building distribution systems, not to mention just how much bandwidth they are managing.

If you travel at all and need to stay connected, I suggest you read the report, and vote with your wallet when you travel. Stay where the bandwidth is not just ok. Make sure it’s GREAT. Don’t settle for less.