Travel Technology - free hotel had free 20mbps down / 15mbps up free Wi-Fi

I spent a night near Cleveland airport. Weather issues caused me to miss my
flight and UA gave me a free night. Not really sure why, since it was definitely
a weather-related issue. I wasn't about to argue with the agent, of course. :)
I was sent to the Crowne Plaza Hotel next to Cleveland airport. The room was
nice.

I got really bored and fired up my laptop. After punching in the free Wi-Fi
passkey, I was shocked to see how fast their internet connection was. After
checking several internet speed test sites, the lowest, most consistent,
result that I got was 20mbps down and 15mbps up. (!) Just to make
sure my laptop was lying to me, I ran the same test on my tablet and my
Android phone. Same amazing speed! I pay almost $90/month for home
internet connection and all I get is 25mbps down and 1mbps up. That's
painfully slow upload speed if I'm trying to upload all my family photos/videos
and other junk to cloud-based back-up servers.

How is this even possible at an airport hotel? I have been so accustomed to
free Wi-Fi that ran at 1mbps down and much slower up.... Are there other
hotels offering such incredible speeds?

You probably received the free night because United has turned over a new leaf and become very customer-service-oriented since their recent merger.





I actually have no idea why they gave you a free night or how the heck the CP has such fast 'Net access. Only thing I can think of is that few people were in the hotel. Of course, when I think of severe weather at a hub, I also think of airport hotels filling up with people in your same situation....

Waaaah hey !!! that was definitely worth reporting. Perhaps this means the new dawn of hotel actually building capacity for realistic demand :cool:

I spent a night near Cleveland airport. Weather issues caused me to miss my
flight and UA gave me a free night. Not really sure why, since it was definitely
a weather-related issue.


Are you 1K or higher? UA has always had a policy of providing hotel rooms for 1K/GS, even in the event of weather delays.

20/15 is easily possible with a number of companies, from Verizon, cogent, PCCW, TWTelecom, regional telcos, etc.

The hotel was probably on one of the fiber networks. The speedtest would have probably shown an IP address, and identified the network you were on.

Cleveland has some very good internet speed, for example the poor around Case Western Reserve University were given two line 1GB fiber connections for free from the school. There's tons of bandwidth in the town.