Business Travel

Internet use is less in the UK because so many damn people have mobiles for text messaging, phone blogging, and what-not. We can’t help it if you Yanks are stuck with your bulky web servers and RSS and other over-engineered malarky.

Try spending less time looking for wi-fi and more time composing comment that doesn’t sneer.
And when you get ‘back home’ do something about your stupid cell phone system. Or did u bring your phone th the UK and complain that didnt work too ?

No net in the UK? You are a very stupid man.

As for WiFi – not that bad in the UK relatively speaking:

Global Hotspots Ranking

1 United States (13154)
2 United Kingdom (3650)
3 Japan (954)
4 Germany (705)
5 Taiwan (628)
6 Australia (453)
7 Sweden (435)
8 France (403)
9 Canada (388)
10 Austria (364)

Source: Jiwire http://www.jiwire.com/

Whining fucking yank. What a streak of piss you are.

Being a Brit my response is ‘who f*cking cares’.

Now I know UK hotels are rubbish but, with a bit of ingenuity and a little less of the old ’serve it to me on a plate or I’ll f*cking moan all day’ attitude you can usually get a connection.

You probably pissed off the hotel staff who thought ‘F*CK him – let’s p*ss him off and pretend he can’t get access’.

Tip from someone in the know. Be more polite. Don’t talk sh*te about the one of the most IT literate countries in Europe (after most Nordic ones – who are, incidentally more online than you ‘folks’ (yee-f*cking-haa). You never know, you might just get the connectivity you ‘need’.

Alternatively you might be wise to remember your way ain’t the only way. The entire world does not necessarily operate to make your life more convenient.

A quick search of http://www.hilton.com quickly finds the hoteal in question.
It also shows how internet access is available in guest rooms.

Just because your fellow academic (in Cambridge) chose not to follow up on alternatives to DSL (ISDN, satellite, formed a Wi-Fi cell with someone nearer the exchange, etc), doesn’t mean that you should mark the UK as being a Wi-Fi black-hole.

All this shows, is that you should have researched your connectivity options before your trip.
You cannot afford to assume that the world is covered with 802.11

2000 hotspots in Texas is nowhere near enough that you could reliably expect to stumble on one when you need it.

The only way you can *rely* on being able to get online while travelling, in *any* country, is dialup. I’ve done two 4000 mile trips across the US, maintaining a daily blog, and an IBM dialup account meant a local POP from almost any motel. I imagine most of these places were 200 miles from the nearest public WiFi hotspot.

While it’s true that WiFi isn’t as pervasive (yet) in the UK as it is in the US, it’s getting there. I live in Cambridge (as Mentioned by Philip above) and I have 600Kb broadband from home, and the availability is increasing in radius everyday, with BT providing broadband in rural areas when requests reach a critical mass.

Even at home I have an 802.11g wireless LAN which is just beautiful (but not open – sorry WarChalkers!)

My sister and brother-in-law are farmers in rural Herefordshire and use the net on a daily basis.

But all of this is moot. As our Dutch friend says, the pervasive culture in the UK is to use Mobile (Cell) phones for most communication, because our pricing models in Europe are much more flexible and liberal than they were the last time I checked in the US (this may have changed, so flame me, but you paid to receive calls in the US a while back, and the phone companies said that there was no way they could change this, which was undiluted BS!)

I can send 200 text messages a month in my phone rental package without incurring any additional cost, as well as 200 minutes of cross network calls. And I can be guaranteed to be able to use it pretty much anywhere.

Celebrate our cultural diversity chaps!