Thanks but no thanks to LodgeNet's shitty internet connection

I’m leaving San Francisco shortly to return to the delights of ridiculously fast internet in London.

You’d think that the City By The Bay — the biggest city in Silicon Valley — would have uber fast internet everywhere.

Unfortunately not. Not in the sodding Radisson at Fisherman’s Wharf. Don’t ever stay here if you’re wanting to use the shit slow internet.

I think I could probably run to the Google servers, somewhere in Mountain View and type in the search query and RUN back QUICKER than I could using LodgeNet‘s StayOnline complimentary rubbish wifi.

I phoned their chaps yesterday and was assigned a ‘case’. Chap said he’d phone back with a resolution. 24 hours ago. Useless donkey speeds. Next.

So thank you but no thanks to Steve Berry, Ron Peterson, Larry Birnbaum, Mike Henderson, Sherry Mccaniess and Gwen Boyd, the Atlanta-based Executive Management team who, it seems, aren’t doing much in the way of executive managing at the moment.

Based on my experience, which I most sincerely hope isn’t repeated at other establishments offering StayOnline HighSnooze Speed Internet, the management team is professionally rubbish.

You’d think there’d be some sort of network quality check?

“Let me. Er. Let me… I’ll just… Er, Let me try and … OK…” says the support chap on the other end of the phone.

“Could you just reboot it. Or something? You know, make it quicker?” I ask.

“Let me… Er…. I’m just waiting.. er,” he never did, find ‘it’. He’s probably having the same trouble I am trying to connect to the box here.

They must have installed the cheapest connection — some 256k connection — into this place to get it to run this slow. Or the entire hotel and everyone in the North Beach area is using the connection.

I’ve tested with four different devices since Saturday to make sure I’m not seeing things, or getting bum results. Both the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and an array of iPhones and other wifi capable devices find it ridiculously slow.

I did try and go to Starbucks to get a proper connection. Unfortunately it closed in the early evening. The staff began banging stuff together ‘washing up’ and putting away stuff after 7pm. That gave me the hint. I considered, for a moment, sitting with the Air, outside the store for little while. Stupid, though. So I came back to the hotel and spent the evening on snoozespeed.

I think it’s good for the character, to have a shit internet connection. It helps you appreciate:

– that there’s more to life than fast internet (Pffff, I’m not so sure)
– that the people are LodgeNet / StayOnline really don’t care much. It’s ‘complimentary’ meaning Radisson probably pay a fixed fee per month. Why bother getting out of bed for that kind of arrangement?
– that it’s really very difficult to work with a ‘cloud computing’ environment at 5k/sec throughput.

Next.