Five Star Hotels and cheap tactics to eat money. e.g. Paid Wi-Fi, cheap accessories

I am not sure when does the hotels around the world realized that Wi-Fi is probably the most basic need these days. With exorbitant roaming charges complimented by horrible speeds no wonder the first thing people does is to look for WiFi in any place.

What makes it frustrating is when you are on a business travel, and Hotels provide Wi-Fi for the sake of it but unusable options. i.e. Lack of speed or lack of stability or long user id, password combinations.

Places like Starbucks or Restaurants started to provide Free Wi-Fi and we can see how vastly it improved our experience. For myself, I will look for Starbucks when I need to send some e-mails or do some urgent work. Of course, some parts can be improved (especially in Thailand, where they will force you type 12 digit user id, similarly long but with special character password  to get on) but overall no complaints.

But paying couple of hundred dollars for a night stay, and going through the Bad WiFi experience really makes me annoyed. In the first place, why can't the property give Free Wi-Fi to all. Irrespective of one stays in the hotel or not, people need connectivity and it would be wonderful to have option to use WiFi. I love Shangri-La for that and Hyatt started to follow suit. I seriously hope Sheraton and other major groups start to follow.

Second thing is the 'free tooth brush' or 'coffee' they provide as part of the room. I guess most of the frequent travelers carry their own brush and daily stuff but why can't they spend a dollar to provide some acceptable quality stuff? Anyways, enough of complaining and I will stop here. But still, free Wi-Fi; It's a birth right of every individual :)

SK Telecom goes for Femto Cell

Source: Light Reading

SK Telecom opted for Femto to manage the exponential growth of mobile data. Barring city states like Singapore, Hongkong, I think most of the Mobile operators will go in the same way as Femto offers a seamless way for end sub.

For the offload, there are various means. Below is a basic setup of mobile network.

[Mobile]--------{Radio network}---------{Core Network}----------{Internet}

If we see, Femto comes in the extreme right hand side. This has a huge positive impact on the Customer experience. i.e. Customer doesn't even have to worry about the technology and he can continue using mobile data.

If we take Wi-Fi offload this is quite similar to Femto, but the key difference is Customer need to activate Wi-Fi and from Operator point of view the traffic may not even reach his network. If the operator is an integrated operator, then perhaps the network can be setup in such a way so that the wi-fi traffic will be routed to mobile data center or network.

For other options like TCP compression, Video compression I am not a great fan of them as these were created during the early days when any home page with size more than 100KB considered bad web design.

I wish to share a detailed analysis if my time permits. Hopefully in the next couple of months..