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Marriott (Still) Wins The Prize For Most Outdated Technology In A Hotel Room

a front view of a hotel

I’m no stranger to using tech products for longer than I should. That’s why I still use my old MacBook Air when we travel.  I can’t see paying the money to upgrade when the item I have does the job (Note from Sharon: Yeah, it does the job IF he’s near a plug, because the laptop battery hasn’t worked, at ALL, in like 7 years).

Regarding old tech in hotels, the computers in the “business center” are not the newest models but do the job for people who need to print a boarding pass or other document from an email.

That doesn’t come close to the oldest tech I’ve recently seen in a hotel. We stayed at a Courtyard by Marriott that still had one of these on the desk in our room:

For those who may not know what this is, it’s a network cable for a wired internet connection. I’d have tried it out to see if it worked but neither of our computers has a network jack and I left my network card and 2000s-era Windows XP computer at home.

For us, the hotel Wi-Fi worked fine. We even used the premium internet for no charge because Sharon has Platinum status with Marriott Bonvoy.

Since I don’t travel for work, I wondered if anyone still used a wired internet connection when working on the road? There seem to be some advantages but with such an ancient connection, I can’t think that a 20-year-old wired connection is faster than the newer Wi-Fi system.

This Courtyard hotel has been renovated so leaving these connections in the rooms was done on purpose. I don’t know if that’s because they know people are using them or if it was too much trouble to take them away.

UPDATE

Based on several comments to this post about how some work systems require a wired connection or that the Ethernet speed is faster than wireless, I decided to test it.

We regularly stay at this hotel. During our next stay, I brought a Ethernet/USB connector (which only cost a few dollars on Amazon.com).

Upon plugging everything in, I didn’t get any signal. I followed the cable to the box and found that it was disconnected.

I tried plugging the cable into each of the LAN connections. One plug gave me a login screen for the hotel’s systems (not where I wanted to be). The other one did nothing.

Of course, I could have asked the hotel if the connections still worked, but I was fine using the wireless connection. I was curious to see if the ethernet cable still worked, which it didn’t.

This Marriott now wins the award for the most outdated, AND non-functional technology in a hotel room 🙂

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