Asian hotels failing on free Wi-Fi – report
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Hotels in Asia Pacific offer the best Wi-Fi quality, but often at a cost to their guests, a new report has revealed.
Hotel WiFi Test, an independent website that monitors hotel internet services, has published a new report examining global Wi-Fi provision and quality in the hotel industry. And while Asia Pacific’s hotels were found to offer the best Wi-Fi speeds, only 61.2% of properties offered the service for free-of-charge – lower than the US (85.4%) and Europe (74.8%).
But Asia Pacific does boast the world’s top two countries in terms of hotel Wi-Fi, with South Korea topping the list and Japan coming in second. Ukraine was a perhaps surprising third, followed by Switzerland, Romania and Hong Kong. Taiwan (ninth) and Singapore (16th) were the next highest rated Asian countries. The US was a disappointing 40th.
In terms of cities, the Swedish capital Stockholm topped the list ahead of Budapest, Tokyo, Dublin and Montreal. Hong Kong was 10th and Singapore 12th.
Hotel WiFi Test judges a hotel as having adequate Wi-Fi if it offers a download speed of at least 3 mbps (the Netflix recommendation for SD-quality streaming) and an upload speed of 500 kbps (the Skype recommendation for high-quality non-HD video calling). And the global results show that many hotels are simply not delivering in terms of Wi-Fi quality.
Asia Pacific topped the regional table, but still only 51.7% of the region’s hotels were found to offer “adequate” speeds. In Europe just 47.6% of hotels were found to provide these speeds, and in the US it dropped to just 35.9%.
But with almost 39% of Asia Pacific hotels still charging guests for in-room Wi-Fi, the region still has a long way to go to match Europe (25% charging) and the US (15%).
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