10 Mbit/s problem in your network

Wed Feb 27 12:30:43 UTC 2013

>The property jumped on-board in the late nineties, putting in a system
>worthy of the next decade...

>and has never updated it, cause it's "good enough".

This is more likely the root cause of this particular problemŠyou see a
lot of crufty old access points in the big chains, at least in hotels that
bought into wifi in the late 90's or early 2000's.  These things are not
optimized to their environments, and the environments they have to work in
are pretty sucky for el-cheapo 2.4GHz radios to work in.

I'm a Marriott fan, having spent at least 150 nights a year in the past
three years under their sheets, and their Internet offerings range from
pretty darned good (Marriott Alpharetta, newish, built in '08 or '09) to
downright awful (Marriott IAD, I'm looking in your directionŠ) The
correlation between "downright awful" and "installed early on in the
cycle" is strong.

Like others mention, I carry around a lightweight, portable,
doesn't-take-up-much-space, was-ridiculously-cheap-at-a-Target-in-Chicago
access point that I use when hotel wifi isn't up to snuff (Residence Inn
North Loop, I'm looking in your directionŠ) -- it's cheap and easy and
lets me get MLB TV on the iPad while on the road with little interruption.

The point, which I've wandered away from a bit, is that a lot of these
chains probably have put the wifi and network infrastructure on a ten year
amortization schedule, and it's only recently wound down to $0.  Hopefully
that means they're going to start investing in new kit and generally
improving stuff.

My .02c-worth,
-c

On 26-02-2013 11:03 PM, "Jay Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

>---- Original Message -----
>> From: "Owen DeLong" <owen at delong.com>
>
>[ quoting me ]
>> > Ironically, I suspect that it's for the same reason that East Germany
>>has
>> > right up to the minute telephony services these days, while West
>>German is
>> > still sucking hind tit:
>> >
>> > The big properties are, over all, likely to skew somewhat older in
>> > building construction, and because of that, they're not built/wired
>> > for the internal transport; too much rebar in the walls blocking
>> > wifi and stuff like that.
>
>A comment off list pointed out to me that sometimes, it's the reverse:
>
>The property jumped on-board in the late nineties, putting in a system
>worthy of the next decade...
>
>and has never updated it, cause it's "good enough".
>
>Cheers,
>-- jr 'sorry to hijack your post to quote myself, Owen' a
>-- 
>Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
>jra at baylink.com
>Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC
>2100
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