RogerBW's Blog

Mainland European Internet 27 August 2017

Some recent experience using hotel- and guest-house Internet services while travelling through Germany, Sweden and Finland.

None offered any IPv6 at all. Peasants!

One blocked all the good stuff, both VPN and SSH… but it would happily let through HTTPS, and raw port 25/tcp to arbitrary addresses. These people are odd. Nobody else blocked anything.

Only two had a click-through "registration" page (and a reasonably smart bot could have got past one of them). Glad to see these are finally going away.

One of those two, in a major hotel, also suffered from about twice as many 802.11 base stations as it needed, and therefore serious frequency clash, leading to constant dropouts and renegotiations. I bet they employed consultants.

The lowest latency I met was in Lund, roughly the same 5-10ms I'd get to an arbitrary server from my home connection. Worst was 500ms+ on the Viking Line (presumably via satellite at least some of the time), not helped by serious packet loss; TCP retries would come usually through eventually once a connection had been established, but TCP setup and particularly DNS queries vanished without trace about 2/3 of the time.

Nowhere tried to charge. That ship has sailed and only really greedy hotels (Holiday Inn "Premium" Internet) continue to attempt to rip off their customers in this way.

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