Amen, Patrick.

My one traveller's tip for remote connectivity is Kinko's.

Yes, Kinko's. You can walk into any Kinkos with a laptop, sit down and connect your laptop to their network, and use their bandwidth to your hearts content --- without paying a cent. I did this repeatedly on a few-week road trip I took last December, and never got hassled (or even had an eyebrow raised at me) by an employee once; they genuinely don't seem to mind.

You are of course right to prefer such features in your actual accomodations, but I found that where that wasn't possible, knowing I could at least do a morning stopoff to check mail & blogs was a happy thing...

-NZB

Just back from a five-day excursion to P-Con in Dublin.

Connectivity? What's that?

To be fair, there was a phone jack in the hotel room. But this was a fairly up-market hotel in the capital city. Go out of Dublin or stay in a small hotel or B&B and you'll be lucky to find a payphone in the lobby. (Same goes for Scotland.)

I wasn't too impressed by the Royal York at Torcon, either. Phone jack in the room (at hotel rates), broadband in the lobby ... but you had to use a web browser -- not just any browser, but a recent copy of Microsoft Internet Exploder -- to activate it, you had to pay serious money for it, and after paying via credit card it was a nightmare to get an iBook to actually recognize the service. If I was a business traveller, that'd be a big black mark against the hotel right there.

I am, in a week or two, about to upgrade my mobile phone to a Treo 600 (tri-band, GSM, GPRS, runs PalmOS, has a mail client and a web browser and a keyboard). Then I should be able to stay in touch anywhere I go that has mobile phone service, after a fashion. But most hotels haven't yet figured out that providing free WiFi and broadband to guests is becoming as important a feature to business travellers (and geeks like us) as laundry service or photocopying or voice mail.

They've figured it out, Charlie; what they haven't figured out is how they can charge for it, and until they figure that out they're for the most part very reluctant to install it. (In part becuase they don't understand liability issues, and don't want to be the precedent, either.) This has been showing up in the hospitality trade press since 1998 at least.

I've mostly been surprised in the other direction in the past year: connectivity turning up where I didn't expect it.

I made it into Manhattan and even to the Tor offices today for the first time in a really long time today. I drove in David and his crutches (torn ligament -- you won't be seeing much of him in the next month) and waited in the office for him until with Elizabeth in tow until it was time to leave. I was vaguely wondering where you and Teresa were, though I didn't ask anyone.

There is no way that a hotel on Vineyard can be without connectivity. They have an excellent local ISP (called vineyard.net, of all things) which was/is run by an ubernerd, Simson Garfinkel. Tell the hotel now that you expect them to have at least a pluggable-in hub, and preferably wireless in the lobby/bar, before you sign next years's contract.

Graydon: They've figured it out, Charlie; what they haven't figured out is how they can charge for it, and until they figure that out they're for the most part very reluctant to install it.

Sooner or later, they're going to have to figure out that it costs them more to charge for it than to give it away for free.

Given the exorbitant rates they're still extorting for phone calls (AFAIK - I've been using access codes for years), do they have to figure it out?

Peg has, um, pegged it--one model for hotels is to make money by reselling services at an exorbitant price. They can't decide whether wireless is a buck-fifty can of cola or a coffeepot in the room.

I'm a coffee-drinker, myself.

Ah, that's good news. I'd been waiting to hear what you had to say on the Plame affair developments, and wondering a bit at the silence.

Ah, that's good news. I'd been waiting to hear what you had to say on the Plame affair developments, and wondering a bit at the silence.

Patrick, in the Bay Area a lot of hotels tried to charge for decent connectivity (10MB Ethernet) connections at $10 a day. Some of them (including the Holiday Inn Express in Castro Valley that I used to nearly live at -- tell them Claude sent you ;)) still have the charge but never turn off the connection -- just use you own cable. The only problem was that I often had firewall problems with these services and could not set up a VPN connection back to my employer's network -- back to dialup which worked.

My worst experiences were in old hotels, one in the Loop and the other in (of all places) Seattle. I could get a fair dial up there in Chicago to get some urgent mail (this was an old MS-Mail system at the time) and got stuck waiting for an enormous and unneccessary attachment to download while sweating over whether the connection would hold. In the Seattle hotel, I actually had to partially dismanle a phone and the wall jack to get a line out. (At least it was a simple analog line and not one of those funky digital hotel setups in the mid 90's that would ruin your modem). And yes, NZB, I used Kinko's a lot. For example there is a combination Kinko's/Starbucks in Las Vegas I have well marked on all my maps.

These days I am only an occasional road warrior (7 years of 50-100 nights on the road a year is enough) but I am finding Wi-Fi to be the answer in the most surprising places. There are a number of places (Baltimore is one that I have heard of recently) that are creating a public Wi-Fi net just to enhance their attractiveness to hi-tech travelers and tourists.

Claude Muncey: And yes, NZB, I used Kinko's a lot. For example there is a combination Kinko's/Starbucks in Las Vegas I have well marked on all my maps.

I need to mark this on my map. Can you tell me where it is?

Alan, this is the Starbucks and Kinko's at 395 Paradise drive in Las Vegas, just north of the intersection of Paradise and Flamingo. This would be just a mile and a half due east of Caesar's Palace. As I remember, the Kinko's is 24/7 and the Starbucks side follows the usual hours.

I'd like to say it's better elsewhere, but it ain't. Every summer, I attend and work San Diego Comic Con and one other major SF or gaming convention. This year was GenCon in Indianapolis. We stayed in four-star hotels both cities. In neither hotel could I get reliable dial-up service, and because my work-issue laptop does not have an ethernet card (long story, has to do with firewalls and VPN and all kinds of crap I don't understand), I couldn't use the broadband connection provided in-room. My dial-up connection was usually dropped after 45 seconds. (I timed it.) It was pretty miserable.By the time I got back to New York, I had nearly seven hundred emails waiting for me.

The funny thing is that I have no problem with dial-up from residences when I visit friends around the U.S.

So what's that about? (Other than me having a crappy laptop.)

What I'd like to know is are there any ISPs that will give you an 800 number for remote dial ins when you need it. I'm cable-based, but since I didn't want to carry the cost of my old dial-up access, it means when we go up to the mountains, I can't access anything now. It'd be great if there was someone out there that let you dial in with an 800 number. I guess Earthlink used to, but discontinued it.

I attended the Stonecoast Writer's Conference in Maine this past summer and stayed in a dorm at Bowdoin College. I didn't think to do it for two or three days, but after contemplating the ethernet jack in my room and the ethernet connection on my beloved iBook, I went out and got a cat 5 cable for a few bucks at Radio Shack and -- voila! Instant access. College kids these days. They get everything. And only for, you know, 20K or 30K a year.

- Sandra

Ten bucks a day? Cheap. This place, which in previous years charged sixty cents per phone call, now wanted to add a sixty-cent surcharge for every minute after five minutes. Mercifully, they'd forgotten to give us the handout informing us of the rate change at the time we checked in. That plus suggesting to the hotel that we'd walk out on them got us the old rate.

And the connections were, as Patrick noted, unspeakably slow. It took me forever just to log out of Movable Type as Patrick, log back in as myself, bring up my Particles "Edit Entries" screen, flip that day's Particles links from "draft" to "publish", and save and reload. One morning, I literally cooked breakfast in the time it took to save and reload.

Yes, I had my links lined up in advance. And yes, I was using Power Editing Mode.

The hotel's view on it was that they only had twelve lines, and that if guests logged on and stayed logged on (the latest Bad Tourist Habit, I take it), the hotel would be unable to make or receive regular phone calls; so the sixty-cents-a-minute surcharge was just their way of getting us to not do that. We said that telling us that there were only twelve lines, and asking us not to camp on them, would get the same effect. Patrick added the observation that business hotels that charge by the minute usually charge ten cents a minute after you've been on for an hour.

Oh, well. Martha's Vineyard is the land of the eight-buck hamburger. Its simple fisher folk know you have to make your catch while the tourists are running. No doubt they go home in the evening and sing tourist-squeezing shanties with their mates down at the pub.

That hotel could easily leapfrog into the 21st century for less than a thousand dollars in equipment and probably less than they are spending on voice line fees. The problem is that according to the Vinyard.net page, high speed connections are either 56k leased (ugh) or ISDN (faster ugh) which runs $300/month for 24/7 connection. ISDN is available in Oak Bluffs where the Island Inn is located (depending on precisely how far it is from the CO). (ADSL would be much better but is not available.) 802/11 B/G capable wireless routers which will handle either normal or the new higher speed Wi-Fi (it's very nice) run just over $100 and the signal does carry a ways, and through a couple of walls. Let's say four of them carefully dispersed and you should have decent connectivity with any decent wireless card anywhere in a small hotel. And no new wires in the rooms. The wireless approach is so nice, some of the cruise lines are looking at it as an alternative to retrofitting ethernet into their cabins.