On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 6:12 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc@gmail.com>wrote:
And at least in the US, I'm yet to encounter a complementary WiFi at
any hotel that would be doing JavaScript insertion, so I'm not sure
where you get your information that the free internet always means ads or a very high level of tampering.
They exist, although they are rare. eg, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/courtyard-marriott-wifi/ (This particular hotel apparently stopped shortly after this news broke) On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:11 AM, Måns Nilsson <mansaxel@besserwisser.org> wrote:
A VPN or SSH session (which is what most hotel guests traveling for work will do) won't cache at all well, so this is a very bad idea. Might improve some things, but not the really important ones.
The chances of the average hotel wifi user even knowing what SSH means is close to zero. VPN connections are obviously common, but are becoming fewer and fewer by the day - especially non-split tunnel VPN. An on-site transparent proxy(with or without cache) will improve performance to at least some extent, if only because it's isolating the issues of the local network (potentially congested wifi in an environment that really isn't designed for good wifi coverage!) from the upstream. It's far better (and quicker) to handle a dropped packet between the client and the proxy than between the client and the webserver.
From personal experience (around a dozen different hotels this year already) the best thing you can to do improve performance is to avoid Wifi and revert to a wired connection - or if you really want a wireless connection take your own travel wifi router and connect it via a wired connection. The performance difference in many hotels is significant, showing that the problem is often less the hotels Internet connection, and more their wifi.
As an aside, I was sitting in JFK airport (terminal 4) a few days ago and having a shocking time getting a good internet connection - even from my own Mifi. I fired up inSSIDer, and within a few seconds it had detected 122 AP's... Scott.