At SC09 in Portland, I stayed at the Marriott downtown, which was a perfectly fine hotel, except that the restaurant and bar seemed to close at 10PM. What’s with that? WiFi was $10 a day. As I’ve noted before, there is an inverse relationship between the expense of a hotel and the quality and ease of use of its Internet access.
I was in New York City two weeks ago, and stayed at the Millenium Hotel at UN Plaza. Don’t bother. They no longer have ice machines! This is just such a basic requirement of hotels that… I can’t go on. In any case, they don’t have WiFi, they have wired Ethernet for $12 per day.
A few days ago, I was in Baltimore and stayed at the La Quinta BWI. The WiFi was fast, free, and easy. These guys have it <almost> right. There is a browser intercept screen, but it does not ask you to register. All it does is ask if you want to join their email list (no), and then it lets you on the net. There was no problem playing You Tube videos, which usually kills hotel networks.
I was really quite impressed.
In any case, the inverse relationship still holds. Millenium (expensive hotel and bad Internet), La Quinta (inexpensive hotel, free and good WiFi). Marriott, somewhere in between.
I’ll note, however, that you can see a <lot> of WiFi networks from the 36th floor in Manhattan.