It seems I am not the only one to find Amsterdam a complete paradox when it comes to wifi in hotels. The city is trying to promote itself as a creative and connected capital. But it refuses to compare itself to other European countries when it comes to providing Internet service in the capital's hotels. They have always been a rip-off, but now its getting worse. Doc Searls, of Cluetrain Manifesto fame is in town and blogs about his troubles.
In the long run paying for wi-fi in your hotel will be like paying to use the toilet or the heater. You won’t. Meanwhile, it would be nice if it were easy, cheap, good, or at least two out of those three.
Right now I’m 0-for-3 at my hotel in Amsterdam. I just had to call for tech support. The front desk is no help. They punt it to Swisscom, the provider, to which I paid ¤22 ($34.23) for 24 hours, starting this afternoon. When I came back from a sojourn away from the hotel, Swisscom wanted a login and password, and told me the front desk would have it. The desk didn’t, so they got me Swisscom, which looked up my credit card payment and got me a login/pw that the service supposedly gave me on the website the first time around, but I missed it.
Anyway, we’re back up. With a download speed of 384Kbps and an upload speed is 179kbps, I haven’t paid more for less since the worst days of dial-up.
Doc is busy with a great project called Vendor Relationship Management. The public, in effect, need to manage their profiles with vendors, not the other way round as with CRM. More explanations here
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