[Previous entry: "Scatalogic Professionalism"] [Next entry: "further words on the crisis at Wayport"]

11/27/2005: "Wayport: the continuing crisis"

Doc continues the "pay net = pay toilet" metaphor with a damning critique of the (lack of) service available at the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, MA:
Imagine being forced to unfurl promotional messages on a roll of toilet paper just to unlock the flush lever in a pay toilet that barely flushed in any case. At that same hotel, when I asked for improvements to the lousy bandwidth I was already paying for, the person behind the counter called over a manager who said, "What are you trying to do, get some email?" Wrong question. Especially at a hotel next door to MIT. Don't these upscale hotels have any idea how much that kind of stupid service pisses off potentially good repeat business?


What delights me about this is that the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge, MA was one of the original Wayport locations, though I can't find it claimed in Wayport's Master List (it does appear in Wayport's partnership with Know Where. Perhaps some massive database corruption exists inside Wayport's walls.

This hotel in Boston was also the first place where Brett's model started to fall apart. Seems the MIT hackers students were more than able to furnish their own NAT boxes for a demo in one of the meeting rooms, so they only had "one computer" connected to the Ethernet port in the walls. Brett was plenty paniced, even though the exact same code was being used on the linux box that controlled the IP interface to the hotel.

I'll just say it again, What will you do when its all free?"

After re-reading the PR from 1999, I recall that I was always going round after round with Brett about little pull quotes like this:

"Wayport is very happy to be introducing its services to the Royal Sonesta Hotel Boston," said Brett Stewart, chief executive officer, Wayport. "Located near the birthplace of the Internet, the Royal Sonesta serves guests and meeting attendees who value high-speed connectivity when they are on the move."

Since anyone who has a clue understands that the "birthplace of the Internet" either doesn't exist, or is UCLA.