Hotel Broadband: The Ongoing Saga
As mentioned last week for the next few days I’m appearing nightly at the Hyatt Regency SFO. I don’t normally stay at Hyatt’s as they’re typically beyond my budget, but a UK based coworker is here and I decided to stay where they put him for convenience. He’s here two weeks so he got a deal, for my three nights I didn’t.
Anyway, returning to the theme of broadband this place, which is vast, has wifi throughout the rooms. Last night it was solid and pretty speedy. This morning it’s simply D.O.A. A call to in-house tech support, provided by a company called Z-Net, had me try various things…but no joy. I have both a laptop and a netbook, neither of which get issued an IP address. Although both report decent wifi radio signals.
Just recently both 
Here’s a case in point, some weeks ago VUC regular Karl Fife indicated that he had Comcast Business Class internet service…to his home. This got me thinking. When we added the cable modem about a year and half ago we just ordered it through Comcast’s normal consumer channel. That seemed simple enough. It’s how we had the similar service from Time-Warner Cable long, long ago. I simply never occurred to me that we could go through the business services office.
Early in 2008 when Netflix officially dropped support for HD-DVD I thought that I’d have to terminate our Netflix account. We were getting HD-DVDs routinely, but had no plans to migrate to Blu-Ray. Still don’t really. However, my wife had been enjoying downloads from Amazon’s Unboxed service, even if they were all SD and marginal image quality. It was a suitable substitute for Comcast Pay-Per-View which you simply can’t use on a TivoHD because of cable card issues.