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. This type of ranking is easy to understand, and it makes perfect sense from a practical standpoint. 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.
In this 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. In our view, hotel WiFi is a synonym for in-room WiFi; therefore, hotels that offer free WiFi only in public areas are not counted as hotels with free WiFi.
Key takeaways:
- 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 in 7.1 percentage points to the second best country (Japan).
- The United States: Portland is in solid 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 United States: The chances of getting a hotel with adequate WiFi are almost three times higher in Portland than in Atlanta.
The full version of the report is available at
