Good Hotel Internet Connectivity Is…

… when the hotel has understood that:

a) the uplink is the bottleneck. If the hotel just uses a normal ADSL line, downlink speeds do not matter at all if it only takes a few guests to clog the uplink that just runs at a couple of hundred kilobits per second (see my recent uplink bottleneck post)

b) has enough bandwidth to allow streaming content at a megabit/s or so even when the hotel is well booked.

The reason I am writing this post is because when I was in St. Petersburg in Russia recently I was quite surprised that the Asteria hotel in which I stayed (no, this is not a sponsored post) had a 35 Mbit/s uplink and about the same downlink speed to servers in western Europe available, both speeds measured over the Ethernet port in my room. Needless to say that streaming high quality video from my preferred online store in the evening was not a problem.

While their Wi-Fi got quite unstable after a few days in my room and wouldn't recover, their Ethernet connectivity was top notch and their backhaul should not run out of steam even when the hotel is full. And as far as the Wi-Fi is concerned, the seasoned traveler uses a Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi/Ethernet hotspot anyway.

Quite frankly I'd like to see more hotels like this one on my travels that understand how to provide Internet access the right way! Kudos to the Asteria!

2 thoughts on “Good Hotel Internet Connectivity Is…”

  1. Hi Martin,

    do you know ANY payable internet connection for commercial use in germany which has a uploadspeed more than 10 Mbit?
    Maybe a view cable connection hotspots, but the only system i know would be a few VDSL Lines parallel bundled on a special router…

    Wolf.

  2. Well, some of them think that having a router is enough. Maintaining it and the connection is another topic. Hoping that one too. I experienced wasting my money because of the not good internet connection.

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