Just wondering if anyone is staying in the hotel de L'Europe in Amsterdam, and if so if they could post about the internet speed these days.

I stayed there once before and the hotel was beautiful, but the internet was slow. They have no wired internet access, only wireless, and download speeds ranged from 0.2 MBps to 1 mbps max. I never saw it go above 1 MBps so I think it is capped at that. Averaged maybe about 0.5 mbps, with periods of stifling slowness crawling at 0.2 mbps.

Here's the Amsterdam city website, boasting that the Netherlands has the fastest internet in Europe.

http://www.iamsterdam.com/en/busines...stest-internet
"The national download speed average in the Netherlands is 7.5 Mbps (megabytes per second)." [sic I think they mean megabits per second]

Yet despite this, this hotel in the middle of the capital city of the Netherlands has very slow internet. Something's wrong here.

They are really behind the times. When I complained about the slow speeds, they told me "Sorry when everyone uses the internet at the same time, it gets slow." Imagine if you tried to pick up the telephone and there was no dial tone. Would they say "Sorry, many guests are using the phone at the same time, we cant get you a dial tone". Or if the electricity or water in the room went out? The price of one night's stay in one room per month could increase the hotel's bandwidth by orders of magnitude, judging by pricing of local ISPs in Amsterdam.

Anyway everything else about the hotel was excellent. I'd like to go there again and am wondering if the situation has improved. I would ask them to test it for me, but the rooms have wireless internet and the hotel staff are likely wired. The only way they could really check it out would be to go into a room with a laptop and test it through the wireless, doubt they will go through the trouble. Also, frankly, I think a traveller's word would be more objective and reliable.

If anyone is staying there, could you test the speed in the room and post what it's like? If possible, use this website to test download speed from America:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest

Thanks in advance if anyone is able to help me out

Was there twince the last year (july and a month ago, for new year's eve) and the wifi was ... average :
. great variations of speed depending on hour, number of connections at the same time .. (ex : loading a facebook page could sometimes take 30 sec )
. parts of the hotel having really bad / inexistant signal reception ( my room, at christmas was a superior suite, number 302, and wifi signal was so low browsing the internet was not possible = In Room Ipad useless)

= Internet really so so
Apart from that, the reno is really nice, service is up to par and location is unbeatable, for my needs .

Thanks for the info. Your recent experience (1 month ago) staying there is valuable to me, as it suggests things haven't changed/improved. I'll play it safe and stay elsewhere, I'm planning to go to Amsterdam again pretty soon.

Agree with all your comments. The hotel itself is beautiful, my favorite in Amsterdam, internet aside.

However the internet access was plagued by variable speeds, variable signal strength. Sometimes speed was OK. Never great. Often very slow. It would be such a small investment for them to bring this into the 21st century. Is no one paying attention there?

Anyway I hope the situation improves. I'd love to stay there again, but I will have to prefer other hotels instead since fast, reliable internet access is not a luxury for me, its a necessity for my job. (Even when on vacation, unfortunately.)

Some old-thinkers at the hotel need to understand that (a) fast, reliable internet is as mandatory in a 5-star hotel as running water and electricity, (b) it is possible to provide such, at fairly low cost, if they would get a project manager and an IT person who know what they're doing.

They could actually make this into a revenue-positive move. Well, first, it would be revenue positive because, whether they realize it or not, guests notice that the internet is poor and may either leave early or not come back as a result. So I am sure they will make more money spending a piddling amount on wiring the hotel better. Plus, they could sell premium internet access. I dont mind paying for that. At the hilton amsterdam, the regular internet speeds are great and would be enough for me as-is. However they have an option to pay a fee and get premium access, even faster speeds, which I gladly paid for the luxury of even better internet access.

One thing I really wonder is why they don't just enable the ethernet ports on the telephones. The phones are via an ethernet network. There is an ethernet cable that plugs into the phones. That's how they work. There is a port on the side of the phone which reads "Ethernet". However these ports are not active. The hotel is apparently already wired for in-room wired ethernet, if they'd just turn it on, it could help a lot of people suffering from the poor wireless signal problem. Whoever is managing their IT is really out of touch.

Up until at least several years ago, when the renovations started, they had been charging a minimum of 15-20 Euros to use the Internet at all, including to confirm flights and do OLCI in their lobby business center, although they then started to relent and let the front desk staff print boarding passes for guests.