I am in a third world country when it comes to Internet connection speeds. Neither do any hotels in Las Vegas nor San Francisco provide any decent Internet upload speeds. Since I left the Press Room at the CES convention center on the 10th of January, I have barely been able to upload any of my 9mbit/s 1280×720 videos. Here are the places I tried:
– Imperial Palace Hotel Las Vegas : Internet sucks, it costs $10 per day, disconnects constantly, I couldn’t upload anything, Youtube would disconnect. The speed was actually 0 for most of the time. I had to call the ISP HKI Wireless and hold for 20 minutes to get one of their technical service representatives to remotely reboot the WiFi router so that the Internet would work at all. They did not provide a full refund for bad Internet service.
– Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas provides Ethernet connection but the upload speed is very bad, I was not able to upload any video successfully, it would always disconnect in the middle of file transfers (Youtube does not support resuming of uploads) and the upload speed was generally below 30kb/s. Connection cost $12.95 per night included in the “Resort fee”.
– Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas did not provide any decent upload speed either. I was not able to upload any video from that Hotel even though I stayed there 2 nights. All uploads got interrupted and were far too slow, upload speed less than 50kb/s over their Ethernet. Price $14.95 per night for the Internet though it’s included in their “Resort fee”.
– Treasure Island in Las Vegas did provide below 80kb/s upload speed, I managed to upload a couple of videos overnight. The Internet access is available using Ethernet and is included in their “resort fee” as well. Though it was much too slow for me to upload anything significant. I might have uploaded 1GB overnight from there.
– McCarran airport in Las Vegas provide decent 200kb/s upload connection, sponsored for free by Google. So I was able to upload 1.5GB to Youtube while waiting for my airplane to leave.
– San Francisco airport does not provide free Internet access so I did not try. One has to pay T-Mobile some unreasonable amount of money to connect.
– Marina Heritage Hotel in San Francisco has very crappy Internet access. Those are unencrypted WiFi hotspots provide by a company name HotWan. It sucks so bad, nothing was achieved and even checking Emails and browsing the Internet was unbearable.
– I tried about a dozen Netcafés in San Francisco, including Café Trieste on Market, Cyber Café on Geary Street, Quetzal Café on Polk Street, and half a dozen other places. Including the Fedex Kinkos on Van Nesse Avenue. None of them have any usable Internet upload speeds. They are all at less than 50kb/s and a couple might be around 80kb/s if I leech their whole connection (making things slow probably for everyone else in the net cafés), thus making it impossible for me to upload any of my videos without squatting one of these Internet Cafés for 15-20 hours. That’s not going to happen. ISP company named ZRnet provide WiFi at several of the places and hotels, their customer support line has no idea what bandwidth they provide and they disconnect users after 90minutes of use, making Youtube uploads impossible.
It would have been useful if there was some kind of user generated map of Speed Testing of all the download and upload speeds of all the hotels and netcafés. I wouldn’t mind paying $1-$3 per GB, as long as the speed is guaranteed 100mbit/s upload. I thought San Francisco was the Silicon Valley and that they would have decent Internet here. I get much faster private Internet over ADSL2+, Cable or Fiber in Copenhagen Denmark for $40-60 per month than US Hotels provide to all their guests combined.
So please check back within the next few days and I will hopefully have found some ways to upload my remaining 7.5GB of HD quality videos from CES 2010. At the least I will have them uploaded once I am back to real European 2mbit/s to 100mbit/s Upload speeds.
Most importantly, if you know where I might be able to find decent 10-100mbit/s upload speeds in San Francisco, please send me an email at charbax@charbax.com
