In the past couple months

In the past couple months I've had to grab some hotel rooms while traveling, and often wished that there was a service I could call to find out which hotel in the area had the best internet access before settling on one.

This past weekend, I had the luxury of a borrowed dial-up connection before selecting a place and knew there must be a hotel listing somewhere of all the chains that featured ethernet or wireless access. Geek Hotels is just such a list, though it doesn't offer searches from a location, it does have fairly complete listings for each city. Being near Anaheim, we ended up staying at the Sheraton, since it offered wireless connectivity.

Of course, as this technology is still young and unreliable, there were problems. The hotel desk wasn't even aware it offered such service, so they couldn't help when I noticed that even though I had a full signal, Mobilestar's access point wasn't redirecting me to their sign-up page or letting me log onto their network. I spent the weekend connection-free, though it would have been nice if it worked once for a quick five minute email check.

So close, yet so far.