The one wifi stat that changed how I pick hostels

I was booking my next spot in Lisbon and stumbled on a blog post from some guy who tested hostel wifi speeds across 30 cities. He found that places advertising 'high speed wifi' often capped it at 10 Mbps per device, which is barely enough for a Zoom call. I never bothered to check this before, I just assumed fast meant fast. So I started looking at reviews specifically for upload speeds and found that coworking-friendly hostels in Porto averaged 50 Mbps while standard ones were way lower. Now I filter by mentions of 'remote work' and cross-check on Nomad List before I book anything. Has anyone else noticed a huge gap between what hostels claim and what you actually get?

2 comments

2 Comments

emma_ramirez17d ago

Once I booked a hostel in Barcelona that promised "blazing fast fiber" and ended up with a connection so slow I could watch my Netflix buffer bar fill up in real time. It was like dial-up but with more hipster decor. I actually timed it once at my desk in the common area and got 3 Mbps down, which is basically a joke. The worst part is I tried to download a PDF for my flight and it took like 15 minutes. Now I'm that annoying person who reads every single review about wifi before I click book because I've been burned too many times.

simonreed17d ago

Hey @emma_ramirez, did you at least get a good story out of it? I had a similar thing happen in a hotel in Rome where they bragged about "premium wifi" and it turned out the router was locked in a closet behind the front desk and nobody had the key. I ended up sitting in the hallway by the elevator because that's where I got two bars of signal. The PDF thing kills me too, I had to email myself a boarding pass once and it took so long I almost missed my flight just waiting for the attachment to go through.