Novotel – get up to speed

One of the essentials of a hotel stay, up there with the pillow menu, room service, and late checkout is internet access.

I’m here in the Sydney suburb of Manly for the week accompanying my partner at a conference. For us Sydneysiders, its a vacation in a different suburb by the sea, but a world away from our normal inner city existance.  Here there is surf and sun, and a weekend jazz festival.

To let that happen, I have to spend some of my time working – and fortunately, much of my work is not location specific. I could be at home, or in my office, or in Manly, or in New York – and still complete most of my work.  The one thing I do rely on is an internet connection.  I was going to say ‘good’, but I thought that would be assumed.  I was going to say ‘fast’ but I thought that also that would be assumed.

Now, much as I think it should be included in the room rate, this is still not standard practice. So – OK, I am prepared to pay for my internet access – even at AU$24 a day, or AU$66 for 7 days.  But for that I expect a modern amount of speed – something that is measured in megabytes per second.  Note that ‘mega’ in the megabytes.  What I am offered for my AU$24 per day or AU$66 per 7 days is ‘Kilobytes’ – yep – you got it. In fact I am offered 512 kilobytes per second.  That is, like, dial-up speed! DIALUP SPEED! Remember that?

Mr Accor, and Mr Novotel Manly – we will be speaking. No wonder I had to call you to tell you that half your website wasn’t accessible due to bad coding.

Bring on the National Broadband Network I say.