Broadband in hotels sucks

Having surveyed various broadband options at hotels, I found Holiday Inn to be the worst.  A pathetic 28k per second dropping rapidly to 14k per second with 1GB download per 24 hour limit.

 This is just no good.  Especially if you have a lot of data to download - reports, photos etc.  As Holiday Inn is supposed to be for business travellers, I thought this was plain pathetic for $27.50 per day.

Internet surfing is slow, almost ISDN.

The best so far is Intercontinental Hotels broadband, I attained a healthy 50k per second constantly.

Surprising, was the Pan Pacific hotel group, I attained 230k per second but it quickly dropped to 50k per second later.

Working on the road…

Working on the road is somewhat of a hassle, on my Ozzie tour my laptop is of course, just a god send.  However, I’ve found hotel broadband to be a bit of a ripoff but worse still, only 0.5mb speed at best.  With all the junk mail I receive (10,000 per day on average), I have to leave the PC on while I go out site seeing….well some dumb f*ck switched it off!!!  Yup, the chambermaid at the Crown Promenande Melbourne turned off my fecking laptop!!!!  So I had to start downloading again.  I then set the screen saver and put post its everywhere ‘do not switch off my laptop’.  I was not happy!  Another issue to being on the road is the lag between doing emails and sending them when I hit a Net connection.This has resulted in a lag from replying to an ebay email and resulting in negative feedback…fortunately the feedback is in French and I just sold another item so it’s not affected things greatly so far.  Whew!

Work at home…

I’ve worked at home since 1997.  That’s pretty much on my own with my computer.

 I think it’s pretty much the fantasy of someone in their early 40s who are sick of the grind of commutting, their career has stagnated and they’re sick of being told what to do.

For me it pretty much made sense to work from home - office space is expensive and transport to/from is a waste of time.  I dreaded the day I had to get an office but so far resisted - I now outsource a lot of shipment handling and do outcall work also so I still don’t need an office.

 Anyway, it rocks (for me) but as I’ll discuss in this blog, it ain’t for everyone…