plinko83

It means a lot of hotel's kick you out every 24 hours and you have to renew your wifi "subscription." so if you log in for the first time at 11 a.m. the day before the meeting, at 11 a.m. the next day your internet connection will end and you'll need to renew.

so if the meeting begins at 10 and goes more than an hour, you'll drop off at 11 when your internet dies. so the idea is to "sign up" for the internet at say, 2 p.m. the day before so you have a 4-hour buffer for you 10 a.m. video call.

LondonElite

Sorry, reading comprehension issues!

Dread Pirate Jeff

It still varies from property to property. In Charlotte, NC, for example, the Residence Inn Charlotte Uptown and Marriott Charlotte City Center properties were great, while the Le Meridien Charlotte and the Fairfield Inn & Suites Charlotte Uptown both had pretty dodgy internet access to the point where I had trouble both with video calls as well as streaming Netflix or Disney on my Firestick. In the Fairfield, I ended up having to sit on the balcony tethered to my cell phone in order to have meetings for work.

Sometimes complaining to the desk will get someone to investigate and maybe reboot a router or access point, sometimes it just gets shoulder shrugs and "nothing we can do about that".

To answer the other question, if your hotel doesn't have good WiFi, there's always a Starbucks or other coffee shop nearby that does, and I've jumped into many meetings over the years from places like Starbucks, McDonalds, etc.

DeafFlyer

Here is what happened. The hotel offered Wi-Fi was not fast enough. However, at login, you can choose a faster speed. I tried the faster speed for one hour, which was one of the options. The speed of that wasn’t very good, but it could work. I opened up my iPad to check something and discovered it was already connected to the internet without logging in. I checked an it was connected to an xfinity hotspot. That was likely the hotels own xfinity router. The speed was better than the paid version. We used that for the Zoom meeting and it went well.

pinniped

I know it sounds strange, but if I were in this situation I'd probably look for a new build of a midscale brand. Someplace likely to have modern equipment and connectivity and not many business travelers in the building in the middle of the day.

Sight unseen, I'd trust a new SHS or HGI far more than an older, larger Hilton or Marriott.

The lower-end hotels also have the advantage that you can sometimes book a little conference room for an hour or two for a reasonable cost.

DeafFlyer

‘
What is SHS and HGI?

pinniped

Spring Hill Suites. Hilton Garden Inn. Limited-service brands within the Marriott and Hilton portfolios. The hotels tend to be newer on average, located in suburban areas, and set up with business travelers in mind. They've often bland cookie-cutter builds, but I rarely have a dead zone as can happen in large, older hotels or sprawling resort properties.

Dale Goslin

You could call the hotel and speak to the manager and explain your situation in detail. If you can do a phone meeting then it should work out just fine. You could also offer to pay for an ISDN line if the hotel has one. It will be faster than a standard 56k line.

DeafFlyer

That didn’t work well in this case, but probably will in most cases.

username

In the mid 2000s, it was not unusual that mid-priced hotels had terrible free Internet services in the evenings when everyone is back in their rooms. However, my experience has been that most hotels have pretty good Internet nowadays.

It is interesting to see these TV interviews done via Zoom/Skype, etc. with varying video qualities. I guess that is the scaling someone mentioned earlier.

CMK10

I've had to do half a dozen or so Zoom meetings (technically WebEx as that's what our court system uses) over the last year and I haven't had trouble doing so in any hotel room

DeafFlyer

Were you hosting the meeting or just participating?