Tyberius -

I don't think I agree with your home vs public access argument. There are plenty of public venues and spaces that deal with significantly higher volume than the number of patrons in a MLL at any given time and deliver excellent high-speed internet. And this didn't start as a complaint about the internet being slow in the lounges, but essentially unusable in the number of cases that I posted earlier.

With regards to your comments about a few jerks hogging all the bandwidth - that is why they have throttling software installed so that a few folks cannot bring the network to a crawl for everyone else; so your comment I don't think really applies in this instance because that potential abuse issue is (I am assuming) already managed by the network. And the resource isn't free per se - you have to be in/near the lounge with login credentials. I would be very surprised if most lounges even break 100 concurrent connections at any given point.

I think where you do hit the nail on the head though is "when it's working right", and I think based on peoples' experiences and posted bandwidth up/down numbers that it often isn't working right.

A half-hour Skype call is going to use roughly the same amount of data that I am talking about (100 MB - http://community.skype.com/t5/Other-.../td-p/897886); and watching videos (if you are streaming) is going to thrash the bandwidth even more.

Uploading or downloading 100MB is totally negligible for most systems (in fact, a 56k dial-up modem was 4x *faster* than the connection I experienced), so I think that is a moot point. The fact that AC installs desks, workstations, faxes, printers, etc means that most of the lounges are places that have been designed with work in mind.

What I think we can all agree on is that the speed and service are hugely variable and that can be very frustrating when you are counting on it to get some work done.