This website ranks hotels based on Wi-Fi speeds

There are lots of things that review sites should rank hotels on, but don’t. Is it known for bed bugs? Is the “heated pool” only heated during summer when the sun is out? How many ghosts live there? How fast is the WiFi? This site won’t help you with all of those, but it will help you with that last one. Bad WiFi might as well not exist, but most hotels don’t really seem to care about connectivity quality. As long as they can check that little “WiFi Available” box on the amenities list, they’re happy. Sure, you’re paying $400 bucks a night, but you want to stream Netflix? Get outta here.

Hotel Wi-Fi connections can be a big black mystery box. There are those without Wi-Fi, those that charge you extra for it, those that limit you to a few devices, those that only beam it to random corners of the lobby, those that give it up for free but keep it dreadfully slow, those that arghhhhhhh. You get the point: If you’re a business traveler who needs to Skype into a business meeting or upload a large video file, a slow connection can make all the difference in your ability to get the job done. And any speed shortcomings could seriously cause you to rue your room. Enter Hotel WiFi Speed Test: A site that ranks hotels by the speed of their Internet connections. This information is crowdsourced from travelers who use the site to gauge their Internet speeds while at a particular hotel. The data is then presented to readers as an “expected speed”, as well as a range of what they are likely to encounter. The results are revealing: New York’s top-ranked hotel (Midtown’s Pod 39) delivers an estimated speed of 75.4 Mbps—far faster than even first runner up’s 55.6 Mbps (that comes from the New York Hilton Midtown, by the way) . In comparison, other hotels that tout free Wi-Fi pull in expected speeds as low as 0.43 or 0.32 Mbps. Bonus: the ability for users to sort results by star ranking makes it easy for budget-conscious travelers to home in on inexpensive hotels that happen to have super-fast connections.