Sometimes you have an idea, and the universe delivers. Hotel WiFi Speed Test let’s you speed test and search hotels by their internet speed, something I was wishing existed just last week. Since I work primarily on the road, I would pick fast internet over pretty much any other amenity a hotel could possibly offer. Speedspot also offers similar info. It’s funny how sometimes the less expensive hotels often have much better internet — I think this is because they try to do less with captive proxies and such.
Hi Matt, I didn’t know about hotel WiFi Speed Test. I will certainly be using that tool from now on. Coincidentally a week ago I just finished my article on using Wi-Fi on the road. I will now have to issue an update to that article to include the hotel Wi-Fi speed test. You can see my article here: http://www.worksmartandtravel.com/2014/wi-fi-internet-access-road/
Thank you,
Colin Robinson.
tried my area. All I see is them high priced hotels. where all them rich white people stay at. where’s the motels?
You know, where the rest of America stays at?
I’m just sayin’
Hi Matt,
Glad you like the idea. I had basically the same experience in 2012. Was traveling with my GF through the US and there was no correlation between how much money you paid for the hotel and the speeds you were getting. But it’s the same all over the world. So I talked about the idea with people I knew and everyone was like … I am sure that exists. Crazily it didn’t :-P. So I thought, might as well built it. So I did, because otherwise I knew that there would have come a day, where I’d be like – Damn, if I had started working on this 2 years ago. This day was this friday :-P. I mean, I was convinced it is what people want, but now so is everyone else. Still a little crazy how my SpeedSpot pitches to Engadget/Verge/TC/Gizmodo got no attention the last six month, but a post on producthunt about the russian copy goes viral. Well I guess the press had there proof now that people are really interested in this topic. Anyway I thought I stop by and share some thoughts and thank you for mentioning SpeedSpot. Now back to work, there’s a lot more to do.
Frederik
I recently bought Verizon’s jetpack for mobile hotspot.. Works fantastic on iphone and macbook at speeds of 5MBPS to 12MBPS. And it will run on 3G and GSM networks.
A comment on Hacker News I believe it was explained that it’s often because the more expensive hotels got “high speed” Internet earlier and got locked into contracts with crappy providers in the process. Now they’re stuck with overloaded and slow networks from those poor providers. Once the long contracts expire, they’ll switch to a more standard setup.
“Free WiFi” is the new “Color TV!” at cheap [hm]otels.
I pretty much only go to Target because the Kmart wifi sucks…