Hampton Inn Premium Internet Comparison

Since I stay in a lot of hotels on business and personal travel, I tend to get Internet from the hotel a lot as well.

This past trip, we were in a series of Hampton Inns on the back end of the trip.  Since I had three laptops and two tablets (and occasionally a couple phones) we had a lot of connectivity going on.

I decided to do a bit of comparison of the devices and internet speed.  For the speed checks, I used the reliable DSLReports.com.

A couple ground rules.  First, I established that my tablet measured the same speeds as my laptop.  Testing was done one device at a time, when the others were not doing any high-bandwidth stuff like streaming.  The three laptops were always within a couple Kbps of each other when testing.

Given all that, here are the cumulative results of five tests I did, at different points during the evening, late evening, and morning.

The first question I had was “do you actually get more bandwidth with the premium service”.  The answer is pretty clearly, yes.  The premium charge was $4.95 per day.  In two of the cases, there is a small increase, but in the other three cases, it was significant.

I was surprised at the amount of bandwidth being used for uploading.  Most network transactions on the web are a short request, followed by a lot of data coming back.  It seems that some of the bandwidth that is available for uploads would be better used for servicing the downloads.

I think my reaction is that if you need to maintain a stable VPN, or you are running big downloads like Exchange, the premium is usually worth it.

Tags: Hampton Inn, Internet