10 Mbit/s problem in your network

Sun Feb 17 08:36:25 UTC 2013

On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 6:12 PM, Constantine A. Murenin
<mureninc at gmail.com>wrote:

> And at least in the US, I'm yet to encounter a complementary WiFi at

any hotel that would be doing JavaScript insertion, so I'm not sure
> where you get your information that the free internet always means ads
> or a very high level of tampering.
>

They exist, although they are rare.  eg,
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/courtyard-marriott-wifi/  (This
particular hotel apparently stopped shortly after this news broke)

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Måns Nilsson <mansaxel at besserwisser.org>
 wrote:

> A VPN or SSH session (which is what most hotel guests traveling for
> work will do) won't cache at all well, so this is a very bad idea. Might
> improve some things, but not the really important ones.
>

The chances of the average hotel wifi user even knowing what SSH means is
close to zero.  VPN connections are obviously common, but are becoming
fewer and fewer by the day - especially non-split tunnel VPN.

An on-site transparent proxy(with or without cache) will improve
performance to at least some extent, if only because it's isolating the
issues of the local network (potentially congested wifi in
an environment that really isn't designed for good wifi coverage!) from the
upstream.  It's far better (and quicker) to handle a dropped packet between
the client and the proxy than between the client and the webserver.

>From personal experience (around a dozen different hotels this year
already) the best thing you can to do improve performance is to avoid Wifi
and revert to a wired connection - or if you really want a wireless
connection take your own travel wifi router and connect it via a wired
connection.  The performance difference in many hotels is significant,
showing that the problem is often less the hotels Internet connection, and
more their wifi.

As an aside, I was sitting in JFK airport (terminal 4) a few days ago and
having a shocking time getting a good internet connection - even from my
own Mifi.  I fired up inSSIDer, and within a few seconds it had detected
122 AP's...

  Scott.