This may be just an artifact of my personal experience, but I think I’m finding that the hotels offering “free Internet” are more often the low-priced hotels than the more expensive ones. At least in Paris and London.
It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.
Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.
And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.
{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}
{File under Pitfalls of Startup Organizations…}
{File under Boomer tales}
In early June, I was in a nice rainy East Coast US city for meetings dealing with particularly thorny issues related to ways the Internet experience is being killed off for regular folks—and for institutions (NGOs) that are promoting free speech and human rights. Over a small breakfast, I sketched in my book some notes about the progression of malware over time. Basically paralleling