I've written before about how crummy Swisscom's Eurospot WiFi service is; this service is ubiquitous across European hotels, and it costs a fortune, throttles your connection, caps out after a certain number of bits transferred, and blocks ports. Every hotel seems to have a different Swisscom tariff, and it seems that Ben Hammersley may have found the highest Swisscom fee yet: £480 per 24 hours for non-guests using the conference spaces in London's Victoria Park Plaza hotel. That's $838.73 a day. For WiFi. Not even good WiFi. (Now, of course you won't stay in the conference space for 24h — I'd probably cap out at 16-18h a day, meaning I'd only pay $559.17 to $594.04 a day. A bargain at twice the price)
I'm sat in the Guardian Changing Media Summit, at the Victoria Park Plaza hotel in London, and the wifi is priced as above. Staying in the hotel, it's £15 for 24 hours. But if you're down here in the conference room, it's £10 for 30 minutes. That's £480 for 24 hours. I believe that's the hotel equivalent of "Hi! Fuck you!"
Update: Looks like Ben's blog is temporarily down; I'm sure it'll come online again soon, though.
Update 2: It's back up!
