U.S. Hotel Broadband Sucks
Holy C%&^@. Does the broadband in this hotel ever suck!!!! Seriously, I’d be better off with a 56k modem and trying to dialup my Covad access. This week I’m staying in Austin TX at the Candlewood Suites, which is an extended stay portion of the Holiday Inn empire. At $119 a night its not dirt cheap, and they promote the free broadband as a major feature. It’s wired too, which is normally better than free wireless.
However, it’s provided through an outfit called SuperClick. They suck. I spent 30 minutes on the phone to them this evening just because their captive portal arrangement was so slow that it never offered me a login page.
Their tech support was operated out of Montreal, which is nice…I love Montreal…IMHO its one of the greatest cities to visit in North America.
Je suis Canadien, j’adore Montréal. New Orleans as well.
But even after they got me logged in the service was barely functional. For some insane reason they backhaul everything to a location in Atlanta. Any web service that makes an effort to guess my location by IP thinks that I’m in Georgia.
Maybe this will be the motivation for me to sign up for an EVDO service, or perhaps WiMax eventually. Since T-Mobile is finally rolling out its 3G network maybe I can tie a new wireless broadband service into my cell account. I spend enough days on the road that lack of functional broadband causes serious frustration.
Do you hear that Mr Holiday Inn? I will not be staying here again. I’ll be at the new Hyatt Place or Marriott down the way. G’night.
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Im having problems with superclick here at the intercontinental here in miami.
this will be my last stay at this hotel and i guess ill have to call in advance of booking to see if my next hotel uses superclick.
The really sad part about broadband in hotels is the fact that the ones that offer free internet are usually down-market. All the up-market chains did longer term deals with providers based on profit sharing the cost billed to guests.
So I can use Hotwire.com to get a great deal on a room at a Hilton, Renaisance or Intercontinental…but then face $10/day for net access and $29/night for parking.
I’ve lived in Candlewood Suites myself for most of the last 2 years and I know exactly what you’re talking about. The networks really are fast once you convince tech support to disable the superclick i-frames. I’ve written IHG many times to disable this unfair hijacking of captive guests’ web browsers on the Superclick networks to expose them to targeted localized advertising. Yup that’s the whole reason behind the scheme-targeted localized advertising. Ironic thing is 99% of the time, nothing being advertised on the upper i-frame that’s so pervasive you cannot even disable the i-fram through traditional methods. I literally have tech support on speed-dial on my celll phone I have to call them that much. Worse yet is I have to argue them into submission in order to get the superclick “features” disabled on my end.
found this page by googling “superclick sucks.” Update to the original post:
3 years on, Superclick is still pretty useless for anything but monitoring your traffic to target you with ads. In an icgroup hotel; free wifi and broadband, both are as slow as dial-up.
Nothing on tv? Think you might want to watch videos online instead? No can do.
On wifi, connection speed says 54kbps, web searches work fine but if you want to watch a video, be prepared to wait 3 hours for every 10 minutes of video. Switch over to the broadband cable, 100kbps, takes 30 minutes to download 10 minutes of video.
To be fair, it only seems to be this slow for roughly 18 hours out of every day; if you want to conduct all your web traffic between 1 a.m. and 8 a.m., it’s reasonably fast.
I see AT&T just bought Superclick; SUCKERS.