That was the original idea of Hotel WiFi Test: use social media pressure to call out hotels with slow WiFi. That's still an important use case. Then, to our surprise, we found that some hotels provide very good WiFi (and in most cases it is free). Showcasing such hotels is win-win: travellers get fast WiFi, hotels get more business for their effort.
brokentone, what is quality in your opinion? Is it connection speed? If it is more complex than that, what would be the best way to quantify it?
Most hotels offer free WiFi, so it is easy to skip hotels with paid WiFi. We will add more filters (including this one) soon.
This may be true in the US but I don't think it's necessarily true in Europe. Too many hotels in the UK/Ireland claim to offer "internet access" which turns out to mean no wifi (or mysteriously permanently broken wifi) and one ancient PC in reception which nobody can tell you the password for. Germany was better for wifi but often had paid wifi in the rooms and free wifi only in reception, which I guess still lets them advertise it as "free".
Still, I like the site idea. If I could use the site to avoid the above, all the better.
I'm sitting here in a Travelodge in Scotland and their WiFi access amounts to 30 minutes free then I'd have to pay for it - NOPEKTHX.
So I'm using my android phone as a hotspot - it's probably more secure than attaching my laptop to the hotel's service anyway - plus my plan (3's The One Plan) allows unlimited hotspot use anyway, so why not.
I remember being in a decent hotel in Singapore a decade and a bit ago which had wired internet access and I was curious and ran wireshark on my laptop booted into Linux - it was a horrifying sight of port scans and SMB exploit attempts.
Yes, latency is very important. We found that there is a strong negative correlation between bandwidth and latency (faster connections tend to have lower response times). That's why we decided to focus on speed first. We are planning to add ping testing as well.
Really? I've been using it in FF on GNU/Linux since it was announced 2013-04 without any issue (other than switching to a different tab seems to throttle connections). I've got the latest FF 31. What version/OS/graphics do you have?
I would expect the very slowest connections to be T1s, which have excellent latency (and reliability) but almost no bandwidth. Then DSL/cable connections, with bandwidth between 5 and 100Mbps. Anything 100Mbps or greater would have fiber, with the correspondingly low latency again.
