At No. 16, Bengaluru Only Indian City in Global Ranking of Hotel WiFi Quality and Price

BENGALURU ranks 16th among 50 cities across the world where a global agency tested hotels for the quality of their WiFi connectivity and the number of them that offer the service for free. It is also the only Indian city to make it to the list, where the Top 3 are Stockholm, Budapest and Tokyo. Berlin and Munich are just above Bengaluru at Nos. 14 and 15 respectively, and Seattle, Rome and Barcelona follow it in the global rankings just released by www.hotelwifitest.com. The ranking are limited to 50 countries that are in Hotel WiFi Test's most-tested category. Not getting free WiFi connectivity has become a sore point with travellers across categories because it is seen by them as an entitlement because of the high prices they other pay both for their rooms and food and beverages. Keeping the sentiment in mind, a quick look at the Hotel WiFi Test global rankings reveals that Istanbul and Stockholm are the most generous cities in this regard - 91.5 per cent of Istanbul hotels offer complimentary WiFi; the percentage is 89.5 in Stockholm and 87.9 in Barcelona. Among the much-travelled cities, Dubai is the stingiest, with only 40.9 per cent of its hotels extending this courtesy. Tokyo is a distant second from the bottom with 51.2 per cent and Washington, D.C. and Las Vegas follow with 58 per cent and 59.1 per cent of their hotels offering WiFi services for free. The global rankings also throw up interesting regional snapshots. Asia, for instance, is at the top for hotel WiFi quality (49.5 per cent), but at the bottom for the percentage of hotels offering free in-room WiFi (61.2 per cent). South Korea is the leader in hotel WiFi quality (92 per cent) by a healthy margin in 7.1 percentage points to the No. 2, Japan. Even though Sweden is only No. 7 in the country ranking, Stockholm is No. 1 among cities. The definitions following by the study are: A hotel, according to www.hotelwifitest.com, 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). "This type of ranking is easy to understand, and it makes perfect sense from a practical standpoint. For most travellers, 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," the study points out. 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. Hotel WiFi is a synonym for in-room WiFi; hotels that offer free WiFi only in public areas are not counted among the ones offering free WiFi.

Sourish Bhattacharyya is the Consulting Editor of BW Hotelier.