It is apparent to me that many of our hotels in the U.S. are ill prepared to deal with the legions of clients who are now showing up for educational technology conferences with laptops in hand. Back in February, I was shocked to see that the “high speed connection” at my Holiday Inn hotel in Austin for the TCEA conference was consistently topping out SLOWER than a 14.4 modem. Yesterday at the SITE conference in San Antonio at the Riverwalk Crowne Plaza, I and other attendees repeatedly saw (and I saw again this morning) the following screen when we’ve tried to log into the COMMERCIALLY PROVIDED Internet access we’re each paying a daily fee to “use:”
This is not just an issue of wireless access point capacity, as I thought it was earlier in the day. When I returned to my hotel room yesterday afternoon and plugged into the wired ethernet network, I was presented with the same same message. The net result was, I was substantially delayed in my need to check email to get a phone number, to make a call I needed to make in a small window of time between sessions at which I was either required to present or wanted to take in as an audience member. How frustrating!
I’m not dreaming of a white Christmas, I’m dreaming of a 3G network card that would give me direct access to a high speed Internet connection independent of hotels’ apparent inability to deal with increasing bandwidth requirements of their paying clientele.
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On this day..
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- US Army Moving to Embrace iPhones, iPads, and Blended Learning – 2011
- Tales of Digital Magic presentation resources #pbtechconf – 2010
- Maine laptops for grades 7-12 now, Texas still forcing paper textbook purchases – 2009
- What are the new literacies? – 2009
- Oklahoma City National Memorial Videos and Possible VFT – 2008
- Cell phones in Cuba today, political changes tomorrow? – 2008
- High Quality Learning: It’s all about Nature (technology) AND Nurture (pedagogy) – 2007
- Mentoring and Edifying Student Bloggers – 2006
- Meet Charlene Chausis! – 2006
Comments
One response to “Bandwidth blues”
I share you dream about Internet connection away from home independent of hotels etc. I came to Texas for two weeks to the Site conference and is highly dependent upon Internet access – trying to communicate with my students back home. BTW the Microtel motel I was staying at had perfect Internet connection.
Thank you for all this wonderful notes from the Site 2007 conference. It helps me a lot reflecting upon the sessions as I am not native speaker of English and therefore I miss out a lot.