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385 kilobits/sec is NOT "high-speed internet"!

Zenmervolt

Zenmervolt

Elite member
As some of you know, I'm a software consultant and my job means I travel all the time for work. I stay in a lot of hotels and end up visiting a lot of places, but the current hotel takes the cake. This is an extended-stay type of hotel that caters to business travelers or other people who will be staying in the area for an extended period of time but not long enough to make renting an apartment viable. It is marketed as an slightly upscale extended-stay hotel and, by and large, the furnishing bear this out. With one glaring exception.

The "high-speed internet" is capped at 385 kbps. Yes, that's kilobits, not kilobytes. Actual throughput in practice is less. It's absolutely worthless for doing any kind of work on. VPN? Nope. Citrix? Nope. It barely manages to handle OWA acceptably. How the hell do you run a hotel catering to business travelers and cap the freakin' internet at 385 kbps?! That's worthless. I can get a 1.2 mbps connection through my cell phone (granted, ping times suck) for cryin' out loud. Really, what's the point here? Are they trying to reduce their costs by forcing business travelers to work from the office instead of coming back and messing up the hotel rooms? Are they just stupid?

/weak rant

(Yes, I called their tech support number; the provider's first response was "Kilobits? None of our services should be maxing out that slow..." but after researching it appears that the hotel is signed up for 385/385 service and that's all it's going to be.)

ZV
 
I stayed in a couple budget ($40-$50/night, cheap for tourists, not for locals) hotels in China a couple years ago and they both had high speed internet that was fast enough that I didn't even notice the speed. One day I even torrented the latest episode of BSG so I could watch it when I got back that night and it didn't even take that long to finish.

You know it's bad when a cheap Chinese hotel has better internet access than you!
 
Originally posted by: Hacp
385 is pretty fast. Its 7-8 times as fast as 56k.
Click to expand...

its also way better than 0Kbps.

ive stayed at some pretty weak hotels, speed testing at less than 100Kbps with pings of 500+. it sucks, but it is what it is. thats why i have a broadband wireless account thru work. sure its 1.2 max, but its better than nothing. and at 400ish with a decent ping, ive been able to deal pretty well. even with larger demand file transfers. it just takes a bit longer, and a bit more planning ahead of time.
 
LOL, I remember when I had ISDN back in the day, with a whooping 128kbps.

You have 3 times faster, what more do you want 🙂
 
Originally posted by: jtvang125
In ISP lingo, "high-speed internet" is anything faster than 56k.
Click to expand...

Yup. 384k isn't bad. I guess over a VPN it would suck, but should be plenty for basic web surfing.

 
Plenty fast for email including OWA. RDP and Citrix are fine especially if the latency is low. Try 128kbps with 1S latency once! :Q
 
Originally posted by: jtvang125
In ISP lingo, "high-speed internet" is anything faster than 56k.
Click to expand...

Yeah. What a scam. I have a 7 Mbit/1 Mbit connection at home. 90+ MBit/??? in the university dorms! 😀

What you have though should be fine for browsing. When are you getting out of there?
 
I used to do VPN over a cell phone connection. I would have loved to have 385/385.

Try more like anywhere between 80 to 320 if I was lucky.
 
When the companies were trying to get money from congress they defined broadband as:
"Broadband" was defined as 45 Mbps in both directions, capable of high-quality video services. On average, these plans called for the ability to handle at least 534 video channels.
Click to expand...

I don't think anyone, anywhere got it then or now.
 
Originally posted by: Rubycon
Plenty fast for email including OWA. RDP and Citrix are fine especially if the latency is low. Try 128kbps with 1S latency once! :Q
Click to expand...

Ouch. And OWA does work, just at what I would consider minimum acceptable levels.

Citrix is so slow as to be effectively non-productive. There's a point where waiting 10-15 seconds for every change in config to register becomes more hassle than its worth. And good luck getting GoToMeeting or such to run reliably.

It's adequate for emergency use, but it just doesn't make any sense to me that a hotel attempting to cater to business travelers maxes out their internet at 385 kbps. I mean, I'm thousands of miles from home for weeks at a time. It would be nice if I could stream a movie through Hulu or Netflix every now and then on the weekend or actually host a WebEx session.

It does make me appreciate home a little more though. 😛

ZV
 
I stay in a place like that in Birmingham. It's Homestead Suites in the Perimeter park area. It's capped right around that speed as well. Completely inadequate for me to remote into a Vista Enterprise box at work. YouTube buffers forever too.

If you have unlimited data on your cell phone I'd just tether that. I get around 1.25Mbps on mine, but only .15-.25 up as far as I can tell so far.
 
Originally posted by: Hacp
I seriously would have died for 385 13 years ago.
Click to expand...

13 years ago, I would have too. But it's not 1996 anymore and people aren't optimizing web pages for 56k these days.

I do tap into the cell phone, but the pings are so bad that half the time the SAP Dev box doesn't get a response fast enough so it thinks I've disconnected. But at least ATOT loads fast with the phone. 😛

ZV
 
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