Slow hotel WIFI

ByGrace Alexander

I’ve been taking statistics for hotel WIFI versus cellular data.  This week I’m at Hampton Inn in Tampa/Brandon, FL.  The hotel wireless is significantly slower than my phone.  So much slower that I was tempted to just tether to my phone instead of using the WIFI.

I highlighted the comparison.  The tower indicates my cellular data and the wifi logo indicates wifi.

I will do my best to rat out others with slow internet because as you can see I track this often.a screenshot of a phone

I should have figured it would be this way since they still use the old access codes, not the current login screen used by most other Hamptons.

8 Comments

  1. I stay in Hotels every week, mostly the Hilton chain. I often make the same test you do. At a Hampton Inn in California last night, I could received a free att wifi as well as the Hampton. The 3g signal was three to 4 times faster than either of the wifis. around 2Mbps. Traveling in Europe, I find the wifi there to be much faster than the states. The fastest I ever received in the states was on a single occasion at the Beverly Hilton and got a download speed of 21 Mbps. On other occasions at the same hotel it never matched that again.

  2. From time to time I find a hotel that promises better bandwidth for a fee. I generally try the free one first and then run speedtest, pay for the upgrade and run it again.

    Occasionally, the paid is lower. Rarely is it higher. A call to the desk to complain takes it off the bill.

    At any rate, I’d like to see paid tracked also, when you find it.

  3. After spending 30 minutes with agonizingly slow connection speeds, I contacted the help-desk of the service provider (not the hotel front desk — I contacted the company actually providing service.) They checked on the network activity at the hotel I was at, and found a few rooms that were streaming video downloads (I assume movies), and several other rooms that were playing online role-playing games that were sucking up all the bandwidth.
    These were in violation of the service terms, so she was able to throttle back their bandwidth consumption, and within a minute or so, my connection was in the 10MBS range.
    If you are stuck in a situation like this, it might be worth a try..

  4. I work at Hampton and I can say that it is very possible to get the slow speed. Most hampton hotel are upgrading to higher speed but there are still area of improvement in some hotel as previous requirement by brand was just 1.5 megs. I am not sure why since we had same issue at the hotel I work and I was told that AT&T failed to anticipate how much bandwidth would people use. More than 90 percent of Hilton properties HISA is managed by AT&T to give consistent service and tech support. I believe AT&T failed to properly guide the brand on bandwidth requirement.

  5. This is basically a widespread problem with most of the hotels I’ve stayed at in the past year. I think they just weren’t prepared to deal with all the netflix streaming that people are doing (of course if the hotel TV systems didn’t suck so much, that might help).

    I think it’s pretty pathetic to pay $15/day for internet and get worse than dialup speeds.

    This is from the Westin in Costa Mesa, CA:
    http://speedtest.net/result/1883466910.png

    I’d never thought of speedtesting my hotel internet, but wow.

  6. I am going to start speedtesting the many hotels I stay in, and I’d already previously complained to the mgt @ the Homewood Suites in Malvern PA about their slow Internet access (they were aware of the issue and they said there were plans to eventually upgrade their service).

  7. I’m at a Hampton in clovis California and the WiFi tested .4mb down .2 up, Fml

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