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The best kind of traveling always produces unexpected adventures. These are the kind of experiences that you want to immediately share with friends and family. But what happens when you're trying to send photos of that gorgeous sunset over swirling sand dunes and the hotel Wi-Fi powers in and out like a crazed jackhammer?
I know that kind of frustration and I never realized that it could be avoided until I saw the Hotel Wi-Fi Report, a crowd-sourced database of hotel Wi-Fi ratings on three continents; Asia, Europe and the U.S. Like a TripAdvisor for Wi-Fi, Hotel Wi-Fi Test rates the fastest hotel Wi-Fi compiled by travelers experiences.
"Numerous studies showed that Wi-Fi is a key hotel feature. However, in most hotels, the quality of Wi-Fi is still very poor. We decided to solve this problem. The service launched in October 2013 but we were running in almost a stealth mode until July 2014," said Hotel Wi-Fi Test CEO, Yaroslav Goncharov. The report only compares hotels on three continents because there weren't enough tests yet of hotels in the rest of the world.
According to Hotel Wi-Fi Test, the top five countries with the highest quality Wi-Fi:
1.South Korea with a Wi-Fi quality of 92 percent
2.Japan with a Wi-Fi quality of 84.9 percent
3.Ukraine with a Wi-Fi quality of 82.1 percent
4. Switzerland with a Wi-Fi quality of 79.9 percent
5.Romania with a Wi-Fi quality of 78.0 percent
The good old U.S. comes in at number 40, regulating it to the 21st percentile for Wi-Fi quality. According to the report, "Wi-Fi Quality is expressed by the percentage of hotels that offer adequate Wi-Fi quality in a given geographical area. A hotel judged as having adequate Wi-Fi must provide an expected 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)."
However, the U.S. delivers when it comes to free, in-room Wi-Fi, with 85 percent of U.S. Providing the service compared to 75 percent in Europe and 61 percent in Asia.
According to the report, the top five cities for Wi-Fi quality in the U.S.:
1.Portland
2.Seattle
3.Albuquerque
4.Orlando
5.Chicago
And the top five cities around the world with quality Wi-Fi:
1.Stockholm, Sweden
2.Budapest, Hungary
3.Tokyo, Japan
4.Dublin, Ireland
5.Montreal, Canada
To view the entire report and individual hotel ratings, visit hotelWi-Fitest.com.
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