High Stakes High Speed

Sitting at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and just saw that Google has teamed with Boingo to provide jet setters at this airport free Wi-Fi for the holidays. Now that's progress.

Finding a Wi-Fi network is harder than you think these days. I travel for work, and that work involves throwing events for a technology company. Internet access is a necessity for this - demos, dowloads, cloud computing, community forums, etc. And my choices for hotel accomodation and venue selection are now completely driven by these two criteria:

1) Wi-Fi network (free or not)
2) Personality/fit for the concept of the event

In that order. So in terms of events, hotels are out of the picture for me. All a hotel event does is prompt a passive agressive nerd fit in front of an audience for 6 hours straight. And I say that with love.

Anyone interested in making a load of dough in telecommunications will revolutionize the hospitality industry with reliable high speed network access for their event centers or whatever they call those areas in the basement or former garage of Hyatt's, Sheraton's and Marriott's with ugly carpet, a plethora of podiums and hideous gelee art - for a sensible fee. Amid the guise of corporate security, these areas are usually lacking internet of any kind unless you pay $1000 for a single hard wire with one user allowed, but your guests will hate you as your keynote speaker or his/her technical minion taunts them with the cursor on some demo server projected onto a large screen scrolling down the wall.

And these hotels do not have the personality to make up for the absurdity of their technological irrelevance. See above reference to gelee art.

Now, as a guest, you may get a wireless connection in your room or in the lobby, but it won't last long. Before the next Replay of the piped in orchestral Sound of Music soundtrack, the network will get crowded and drop you. Kinda like the cheerleader clique in high school.

SO here's the call to arms: hotels need to speed up and true up. No more $1000 DSL cable that creates resentment and hostility among guests at events. $1000 should open up a private network for eveyone at my event instead. It's a tiny investment with foreseeably large return.
I'm done with hotels personally, I'm just trying to salvage what little potential they still may have for other corporate events.