Welcome to FT.

My experience is the same no matter where I stay. Five years ago, I had fairly decent bandwidth. I use T-Mobile's WiFi calling auto transfer on my BlackBerry and never had a problem when making and taking calls via "HotSpot" until about 3 years ago. "Hotspot at Home" was what T-Mobile used to call their WiFi calling transfer protocol - not to be confused with a hotspot that allows devices to connect and share a node. The neat thing is that it's transparent, and your cell number transfers back and forth between wireless network and WiFi seamlessly. It's very handy when traveling overseas and where cell signatures are just not present. I can hop on WiFi and make and take calls with my regular cell number.

Today, no matter where I go, with tens if not hundreds of fellow travelers sharing the WiFi band, I can not make or take calls on my BlackBerry via WiFi without huge dropouts, digital break-up and sheer unintelligible conversation. VOIP does take up some considerable bandwidth, as does streaming videos and whatever else my fellow travelers are doing. So if the pipe is, say, 3 mpbs down and 1 mpbs up, and 40 others are sharing it, I do not have enough bandwidth to effectively use VOIP. The same holds true for Skype when I'm traveling. Most hotels just don't allow me to reliably use the technology.

I've actually had better luck at more budget hotels that happened to be empty of travelers that evening, when I could do a speed test and truly get 1 mbps down and at least 1/2 a meg up.

Most hotels simply don't have enough bandwidth in their internet WiFi packages to handle such heavy traffic.