Working Anywhere

San Diego Airport WiFi Slows Down

San Diego Airport used to charge for WiFi via a third party provider. When they had an option to make a change they chose to go "free."

Tonight at gate 33 waiting for my US Air flight I saw what free gets me. 82K download.

That is pathetic. I spoke earlier in the week to the IT Director for the San Diego Regional Airport Authority. He claimed they would be monitoring speeds and loads and that they had two DS-1 lines. Basically three megs for all the traffic. I did some math and figured out that would be between 50 and 100k per user at off times. Looks like I was right.

Airports going the free route need to either have ten-20 megs of bandwidth or have access to bandwidth on demand.

Where is Boingo when I need them!

In the Media-Stay plugged in on the road and in the air

Part of the fun of being a quotable blogger is seeing yourself in print. Today Paige Wiser of the Chicago Sun Times has a story that really helps people figure out how to be working anywhere, and guess what? I'm quoted.

Renaissance Hollywood-From Great To Awful

The last time I stayed at the Renaissance Hollywood I had a solid and very positive broadband experience.

Not today. The speeds were awful. The packet loss and jitter were off the charts in a bad way.

Imagine 14 percent packet loss and what's more over 300 ms jitter.

That's not good at all.

Printing To Go

HP is introducing a new service called Cloudprint that makes printing documents very easy using a combination of cell phone SMS technology and web based file storage.

What I like about this is the fact that document printing becomes portable and using locations such as Kinkos or UPS Stores the ability to do more than just have a PDF type file becomes the end result.

A Tale of Two Networks (In The Same Hotel)

Recently I had to stay in San Jose and I chose to stay in the lovely Fairmont Hotel. I've stayed there before and always felt the experience was worth a return visit.

The first room I was given was by the pool, but had a tobacco odor even though it was a non-smoking room. As a President's Club Member I was quickly moved and upgraded to a junior suite.

Great room, but the broadband wasn't working right. It seems the main building is wired like a DSL network and somewhere someone was sucking up the bandwidth giving me speeds under 100k. The MIS called the President's Club and moved me to a killer full on suite in the tower and wow, amazing speeds. 1.5 to 2.5 megs in both directions and consistent over the next three days. It seems they wired the tower with all CAT-5 cables and made it very business traveler friendly.

The suites are fantastic as is the attention to the business traveler from the GM Cyril Isnard on down. I'll be staying here again and again thanks to his "make the guest happy approach."

Andy's Road Warrior Grade for the San Jose Fairmont-Tower

A

Broadband A+

VoIP A+

Streaming A+

Power Outlets C (sorry, not enough and not in the right places)

Customer Service A

Restaurant (The Grill) C- While the steak was great the sides and salads were tasteless and bland. My comment to the manager seemed to be viewed as "picky" but since I had eaten at the Grill on Hollywood one week earlier and had a similar order of food, and a more tasty/flavorful experience I felt very qualified to make the point. The Bone In Rib Chop was amazing though and flavorful so I suspect the Sous Chef or Line Cook was not on the mark that night, or the provisions were sub par in quality.