Staying at the Strand Palace Hotel tonight. Handy for town and free WiFi to boot (I paid to stay here obv).
I’m not using the hotel WiFi. Rarely do as 4G is usually faster. On this occasion I’m getting 8Mbps down over EE4G (MiFi) but whilst the hotel allows unlimited bandwidth it is only giving me 7mbps. Worse than dial up. What’s more the data transfer allowance per session is only half a bit. How does that work? Quicker to walk.
Perhaps there is a mistake. You can check it out for yourselves in the pic of the instructions they gave me.
See other high profile mistakes of this nature here.
6 replies on “Miniscule WiFi data bandwidth allowance”
Can’t remember if I’ve done this particular one before and not looked. If I have it’s worthy of a repeat 🙂
Hotel WiFi is rarely any good. I’m staying in s hotel in Edinburgh at the moment (a major chain) and all rooms come with “Free WiFi”. Note they don’t actually call it free Internet access, which if they did would be somewhat misleading, as the WiFi service only allows a limited range of ports/protocols via a transparent proxy. The little WiFi logo on my phone which usually lights up blue when Internet access is present remains grey, even after I’ve gone through the captive portal stuff…the phone thinks there’s no Internet access. It’s kind of right. Of course they do this to then try to upsrll you a better service where yore not so restricted, and while this isn’t entirely unreasonable, I still don’t like it.
I try and avoid using in-room WiFi in hotels, it’s usually pretty bad. It’s usually a lot better in the diminishing proportion of hotels that still give you in-room wired connectivity, I always try and plug my travel router into that where I can. I don’t know if they’ll ever get that the hassle of pointless captive portals and charging are not just worth it compared to decent 3G never mind LTE.
7 meg isn’t worse than dial up though. My first attempt to use 4g today in London. Pretty shaky, having to connect to another network to force the sim to reaffiliate to the Vodafone network.
Hey Domhnall
U in london? Want to meet up? Breakfast?
Oh the old “unlimited” data transfer but 500 mb per session trick? Well at least they’re not as bad as when an ISP or mobile operator makes the same mistake :).