Hotels

Radioactive Networks staff need at times to travel all around the world - and need to stay in touch at all times. Usually this means dial-up internet access - and we have used this very successfully in the past. Visiting the USA we have found that BudgetDialup.com provides excellent service - but it is still dial-up. The problem is not the speed, but the hotel charges.

Hotel Charges are often up to US$1.00 per call, for a local call. In Australia and New Zealand, charges are also often about $1.00 per call. This can ge expensive. So wireless can be a option. So can in-room broadband where available.

Hollywood
This picture is from my hotel room in the Holiday Inn on North Highland Ave, Hollywood, looking south onto Highland Ave. I have stayed in this hotel a few times, and they are not bad. I have definitely stayed in worse hotels. Their phone system is amongst the worse I have dealt with - at least in terms of adding illegal charges. They state that they charge long distance charges for any call that is not in the same area code as the hotel, or for any call more than four miles from the hotel.

This is actually illegal since Los Angeles has a number of area codes, and calls to a different area code may be local. Given the cost of dial-up I used my D-Link USB 802.11 adapter to obtain a wireless signal. What I found was that the signal was maginal at best. To solve this problem I attached the adapter to the curtain with a lanyard that I had in my bag to give away as a gift. This allowed me to surf the net at essentially broadband speeds.

The only issue was that I needed to find the outgoing SMTP server. I used TRACEROUTE to work out who the carrier was, and then looked at their www site to work out what server I needed to use. I have no idea who was providing internet access to me, but I would have paid them something for it if I did know who it was.

Wellington, New Zealand
Wellington is a wired city, with an extensive city-wide network called cafenet.co.nz. Looking at the access point list I determined that the hotel next to mine several doors down had a couple of wireless access points. This time I had forgottne to bring a USB cable for the D-Link - but I did bring my Orinoco card from Avaya, and just happened to have an 8 dB gain antenna with me too.

This worked OK, but only when it was on one corner of the window - since the path of the wireless signal was not very good. I attached the antenna to the window using some electrical tape - lots of it. I was sure to take that down when the housekeeper came in, since I had no idea how they would react. For some reason this setup would not work with a 1m extension cable for the coax, so I suspect that the wireless link was only barely there.

Wireless access cost NZ$20 for 120 MBytes download. This was tons for the time I was there - I only used about 40 MBytes. The advantage was that I could also go to Cafes in the city and have a coffee whilst working. Important things to take

• USB Wireless Card and LONG USB cable
• Wireless Card with N Connector
• 8 dBi Antenna
• Electrical Tape