NEW YORK—Hotel WiFi Test has released a new report that ranks cities, countries, and world regions by WiFi quality. Two characteristics of hotel WiFi are considered: the quality of the WiFi and whether in-room WiFi is free.
WiFi Quality is expressed by the percentage of hotels that offer adequate WiFi quality in a given geographical area. For most travelers, having super-fast and consistently stable WiFi is a great bonus, but their first priority is ensuring that basic quality expectations for Internet access are met, according to Hotel WiFi Test.
In the report, a hotel judged as having adequate WiFi 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).
The Free WiFi percentage is calculated as a ratio of hotels that offer free in-room WiFi to all hotels for which the WiFi price structure and availability is known. Hotels that offer free WiFi only in public areas are not counted as hotels with free WiFi.
Key takeaways from the report include:
• In Europe, it is 33% more likely that a hotel has adequate WiFi than in the United States; but in the United States, it is 14% more likely that a hotel will offer free in-room WiFi.
• Asia is at the top when it comes to hotel WiFi quality (49.5%), but at the bottom for the percentage of hotels offering free in-room WiFi (61.2%).
• The United States is only in the 21st percentile for WiFi quality; 79% of countries have better hotel WiFi.
• South Korea is the leader in hotel WiFi quality (92%) by a healthy margin— it is 7.1 percentage points ahead of the second best country (Japan).
• In the United States, Portland is solidly in first place with a 10 percentage point gap over the second-place city (Seattle) in terms of WiFi quality. It also has one the highest percentages of hotels offering free in-room WiFi (86.7%).
• The chances of getting a hotel with adequate WiFi are almost three times higher in Portland than in Atlanta.