People still use public wifi? I mean, I get not everyone can afford data, but like if I have the option of using my phone as a hotspot or using hotel wifi with a password that's printed on all the card holders that only gets changed twice a year, I'm going to hotspot. And this is coming from a millenial who's already signed my privacy over to every available company when smartphones came out.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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It's fine to ask the hotel if they have wired Ethernet in rooms before you book, some do.
Typically wifi, even in the best hotels, can get pretty terrible at peak times.
The problem with speed as a metric is that it isn't just up to the hotel infrastructure if you as a user actually get it. You'd be rating the hotel on the performance of their ISP and other factors not under their control. Let's say you traveled from far and try to access websites from home, and the undersea cable got disconnected by mad shark, it's not the hotel's fault but you cannot expect that all users will consider that it isn't the hotel's fault when they give it a one-star rating on internet speed. If you're behind the great firewall of China anything but local sites are fast.
Well even if its not their fault, if the connection I can get in the hotel is insufficient for my needs, I want to know and book something else.
I mean I understand that but if there are 5 hotels in a given area at least it gives me an option to reward the one with the better internet with my business.
The review would stay and hurt their reputation.
Also, if the service you use is in the far east and the damaged cable in the far west, the results would deceive you and make you believe the internet connected to your service is good while it’s not.
The best option is to advertise the maximum speed in rush hours from local or nearby server.
If I'm annoyed by an internet connection, it's rarely due to one site. Sure, the onward connection is out of their hands, but they have choice of provider and deploy the local infrastructure.
I'd say it's almost better to use the mobile data of the domestic SIM or use a travel SIM with unlimited data instead.
If work would pay for one I totally would but otherwise this solution is working for me
Am I the only one who would never trust hotel wifi with a device I actually care about?
Good use for VPNs
They don't care enough to monitor what you're doing. That's money they won't spend, generally they don't even want to spend on necessary things if nobody's going to sue and/or die from it. That said, treat it like an open network and take your own security precautions because theirs will be minimal.
That's what I meant, yeah.
I use a travel router that feeds everything through a VPN.
I wish I could do that but I need a special certificate.... So I bring an extra phone that does basically the same.
I'd much rather just use a hotspot or something if I could. I don't trust the other guests, and I wouldn't trust the big hotel chains not to monetize your traffic in some way.
When I traveled to Sri Lanka, one hotel didnt have isolated devices active.
Had some fun with another guest that used the android casting by remote controlling the volume ;)
It’s just a normal review on google or yelp.
Download speed doesn't matter as much as ping times.