I spent most of last week at the Agile 2008 conference, which was held at the Sheraton Centre Hotel in Toronto.
In my opinion, this hotel was an epic fail in regard to internet access.
The rooms offered only wired internet access with per-day charges (which is pretty standard for business hotels), but the jack in my room didn’t work. When I informed the desk of the problem, they sent someone up to give me a new network cable, which, of course, didn’t help. After that, I just didn’t bother with internet access in my room. I didn’t feel like trying to get it fixed and then having to pay for the access.
The hotel offered two wireless access networks in all the public areas of the hotel and conference center. Both networks were unsecured, which didn’t thrill me considering I was among 1500 geeks. But that was a secondary concern: the networks were both unreliable; sometimes I just couldn’t get an IP address from them, and other times, I could connect but not get any internet access.
Because of the situation in the rooms, every evening, the lobby was completely full of geeks using their laptops, including me (when the wireless worked).
You would think that business hotels and conference centers would be getting these things right by now.
Categories: Odds and Ends