NEW YORK-- For years I've been loyal to Hilton when it comes to selecting a hotel in whatever city I'm staying in. The rooms usually offer the most important thing to any weary road warrior: a decent night's sleep. But running a close second on the list of things I want out of my hotel room is connectivity.
Some form of Wi-Fi connectivity would be nice since most of the devices I take with me are Wi-Fi enabled. I know it's early in Wi-Fi's lifecycle. Considering how long it took before most hotels got hip to a basic RJ45-based Ethernet connection, I'm happy to take a wired connection. At a minimum, my room had better have an easy way to get a dial-up connection going. That means I shouldn't have to pull out my tool kit to disassemble the phone jack simply to fire up my modem.
Fortunately, the New York Hilton has been working on getting high-speed connectivity to its customers. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the hotel the day before CeBiT, I was informed that none of the Ethernet-wired rooms were available.. "How about a king-size bed?" the clerk asked me, as if offering a consolation prize.. "I don't know," I said. "Is it a high-speed Internet king-size bed? Can I plug my computer into it?" More seriously, I responded: "Sure, give me the king-size bed. I just wish I could get a faster Internet connection."
Little did I expect the clerk to respond that there were a couple of Wi-Fi hot spots in the hotel. "You can go sit in the Hilton Honors Club Lounge on the 34th floor if you have a wireless connection," the clerk said. "Cool," I thought. "I'll just wake up early, camp out in the lounge, get some free breakfast, and do e-mail."
All of this was wishful thinking. The Wi-Fi network that was floating around the lounge was neither reliable nor configured correctly to support secure access of corporate e-mail through a virtual private network. At first, I thought it was me. But when another weary looking traveler from North Carolina sat down next to me with his Wi-Fi-enabled notebook and started shaking his head and sighing within minutes of opening it, I knew it was time for a bit of commiseration.
Getting on the Internet was easy enough. Or was it?
According to the instructions (of which there was only one copy and the lounge attendant refused to let me take it back to my table), I had to first check that my notebook was enabled for a 802.11b wireless, set my SSID to "HHONORS reboot my computer and start my browser. Although I can perform these steps in my sleep, how comfortable would most road warriors be having to change their computer's SSIDs and trying to figure out whether the computer supports 802.11b (versus 11a or 11g). Unless you really know what you're doing, figuring out which of those networks is supported by your notebook isn't exactly simple. Using the Hilton's Wi-Fi network wasn't nearly as simple as plugging a wire into the wall. It should be.
Although I followed the instructions, all was not good in Wi-Fi paradise on the hotel's 34th floor. The network would mysteriously vanish every couple of minutes, forcing me to close all browser windows and reopen one to try to re-associate my computer with the hotel's security system. On top of that, the hotel's firewall apparently has port 1723 closed off. That's the port that lets through the point-to-point tunneling protocol for people who want to establish a VPN connection. I couldn't tell for sure. The desk clerk said the "expert" wasn't due in for several hours. But the error message indicated a port blockage problem. For me, no VPN means no e-mail. Not that it would have mattered. With each connection only lasting a couple of minutes, even if I could get my VPN going, by the time I started reading my e-mail, I would have had to start all over anyway.
Sadly, all this fretting over my connectivity gave me no time to appreciate the nice view from high atop the New York Hilton.
I better not get rid of that modem just yet.
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