We’ve been traveling a lot this year - collectively our sales team has visited 4 countries and 10 US cities, often several times. As providers of an online web service, we are constantly demoing our service and are really reliant on our internet connections. It’s amazing how varied the experience has been, ranging from blazing speed to slower-than-56K Modem speeds. Yeah, that’s slow (for you old skoolers who remember dialup!). The major point behind this is that when people hit the internet these days, they assume they are getting Broadband (cable companies call it trickle feeding!), but are receiving connections all over the place. And it’s really hard to figure out what’s happening.
HOTELS
I have no problem paying $10 a day to connect up in my room, but I do draw the line when my connection speeds hover in the Bytes range. The fastest performance I’m getting in Chicago (Ambassador Hotel) is 25 KBps, and that was for a short 2 to 3 second burst. The rest of the time, the speed monitor hugged the bottom of the speed chart. At my office, we see up to 1 MBps, 40 times the speed. Mind you, these are speed tests running out to major websites like CNN, Engadget and Slashdot.
My biggest observation so far is that the hotels that use Nomadix WiFi distribution points tend to have very poor connections. At first I thought Nomadix was the actual service provider (hey, it’s the only name that consistently shows up once the connection is made), but then realized that they provide hotel-grade versions of WiFi routers. It’s up to providers like WiFi Guys to provide the service… after sitting on the tech support line for 20 minutes, I gave up. To be fair, the hotel connection does work well in some floors and in the lobby. Just not our floor, which is all we care about.
Apparently, managing a hotel connection for hundreds of random guests doing skype or more “nighttime” activities is a really hard problem to solve. Skype seems to be really chatty, sending out tons of traffic which companies like Nomadix want to limit. I couldn’t connect up via iChat, so I figure that my hotel simply blocked that kind of connection.
OFFICES
Same thing is happening at recent office visits. Several clients have recently installed T3 lines, which cost thousands of dollars a month but provide 45 MB/s of up and down speeds. That’s 30 times faster than the standard 1.5 MB T1s many of us have “grown up with”. It’s also really noticeable on uploads, because standard cable or dsl connections really suck at upload speeds (356 KB is common).
On the flip side, I’ve seen a bunch of offices with saturated connections recently. That means 50 to 100 people sharing 1 connection, pulling down internet radio or YouTube or actual business related files. Each time, the IT guy tells me that they are working on the connection and a faster circuit is right around the corner. This is happening in about 30% of the offices I visit, so it’s fairly significant.
WIRELESS
So, if you are on the road, why not use a fancy new Wireless card and not worry about the connection issues from WiFI? Over the last 2 years, I’ve used an EVDO card from Verizon, an EVDO Treo 700p (also Verizon) and now an AT&T HSPDA Express Card for my MacBook Pro. First off, the wireless card is great for those times when you absolutely need to connect and have no other options. But not everything is perfect.
Like cell phones, wireless cards rely on cell towers for their connection. The weaker the connection, the slower the speed… until you are back to dialup sppeds (like Edge with AT&T). The Verizon card would burst up to 80 to 90 KBps with a strong connection, but would often disconnect from the network. The Treo 700p had the same general performance, except when a call would come in. Then the phone would lock up completely, not excepting the call and not downloading properly anymore. The only way to fix it was to pull the battery… Needless to say, I’m glad to be done with Treos.
The AT&T Card keeps a much more steady connection, but up until yesterday was confined to emergency connection situations. I’ve been using it for the last 2 days a lot in my hotel though, as it is many times faster than the hotel connection. Granted 26 KB/sec is not fast, but it’s consistent.
That’s it for now… Got some demos to do!
Regards,
Bill