Hotel Wi-Fi connections can be a big black mystery box. There are those without Wi-Fi, those that charge you extra for it, those that limit you to a few devices, those that only beam it to random corners of the lobby, those that give it up for free but keep it dreadfully slow, those that arghhhhhhh.
You get the point: If you're a business traveler who needs to Skype into a business meeting or upload a large video file, a slow connection can make all the difference in your ability to get the job done. And any speed shortcomings could seriously cause you to rue your room.
Enter Hotel WiFi Speed Test: A site that ranks hotels by the speed of their Internet connections. This information is crowdsourced from travelers who use the site to gauge their Internet speeds while at a particular hotel. The data is then presented to readers as an "expected speed", as well as a range of what they are likely to encounter.
The results are revealing: New York's top-ranked hotel (Midtown's Pod 39) delivers an estimated speed of 75.4 Mbps—far faster than even first runner up's 55.6 Mbps (that comes from the New York Hilton Midtown, by the way) . In comparison, other hotels that tout free Wi-Fi pull in expected speeds as low as 0.43 or 0.32 Mbps. Bonus: the ability for users to sort results by star ranking makes it easy for budget-conscious travelers to home in on inexpensive hotels that happen to have super-fast connections.
As of now, the site (which recently popped up and was spotted by this writer on the product-listing site Product Hunt) still has a fairly limited database—144 hotels in NYC are ranked, but only 13 in San Francisco. But once the data gets stronger, it's hard to imagine this site won't be a must-visit for Internet-tethered travelers. It will also hopefully serve as a source of shame for hotels that provide underwhelming connections—and maybe even a point of pride for those that thrive. I give it a year before top hotels start hanging up plaques that boast about their achievement.
And really, this is just one sign that our current methodologies for listing hotel amenities are often obsolete. The things that matter to many travelers can't be broken down into the standard star ranking. While some folks surely care about the white-glove service, endless rows of concierges, and prevalence of chandeliers that are typical of top-ranked hotels; legions of others (in particular, younger) travelers would trade it all for a decent Wi-Fi connection and an in-room TV that doesn't reset to a PPV-pushing menu cranked to max volume every time they turn it on.
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Seth Porges is a writer and co-creator of Cloth for iOS. For more fun, follow Seth on Twitter at @sethporges, or subscribe to him on Facebook or Google+.
