High Speed Internet My Ass

High Speed Internet my ass. As I sit here at the Marriott Courtyard in Greenville North Carolina, I am waiting for a call back from a tech service person at Golden Tree Communications. I checked in last night and used the internet connection and it seemed to work OK, not super fast, but I was looking at sites in Mexico for some hotel reservations so I assumed that it might have been the hosts that I was going after. This morning the connection was OK in the early morning and around 9:00am or so it went to crap. Ping times were some of the worst that I have seen in a long time:

C:\Documents and Settings>ping my.yahoo.com
Pinging my.yahoo.com [148.87.120.15] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3067ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3241ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3173ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3303ms TTL=240

If I am not getting in the 3000+ ms range it times out. Occasionally I get down in the 600 to 700 range, but it does not last long.

Anyway, back to the reason for the posting. In talking to the technical support person, I asked what kind of connection they had? She indicated that they should have 684kbs which is the equivalent of a $29/month DSL line. How can they call that "high speed internet" for a hotel that has a 100 rooms? One ass downloading an .mpeg of Star Wars will chew that up for hours.

I doubt that they have any type of traffic shaping or any type of filtering for Bit Torrent or any of the other type of traffic hogs.

I guess the lesson is that it's high speed internet until the second guest shows up.