Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
We stayed a couple of days at the Homestead in Hot Springs Virginia. I prefer to use my SpringPCS aircard instead of the hotel wireless for a number of reasons.
My laptop is running Vista and I’m using the Sierra 594U aircard with the Sprint Mobile Broadband 3.05.004 (I think there might be a newer version of the software which I should try)
Anyway, here are the results for a couple of locations at the Homestead
- The garden wing, second floor room, near the elevators. – I was getting 3 to 4 bars but the phl.speakeasy.net speed test reported about 150k up and 150k down. Response was sluggish
- The Garden Wing sitting area – I was getting 5 bars but response was slow and the speedtest reported about 140 up and down.
- The lodge at the ski area. I was getting a solid 5 bars inside and outside (There is an outlet near one of the tables closest to the window overlooking the hotel). Correction to my earlier post. I’m checked the speeds again and the results at the ski lodge were about the same as the hotel, ie 150k not 700k as I had stated earlier. It did seem a bit faster though.
So, in summary, if you can’t get a decent sprintpcs connection in the hotel, you might want to try taking the shuttle to the ski area. The Hotel is more in the valley and the ski resort is another couple of hundred feet up the hill. I think the local cellular tower is somewhere behind Sam Snead’s Tavern (I saw the big fake ‘pine tree’ there. That is not at the top of the mountains so that might be part of the issue. Keep in mind that The Homestead is a huge hotel so your connection quality will vary a lot from room to room and wing to wing.
Also, keep in mind that The Homestead offers free wireless at about 300k speeds and 20 dollars for 2 days for 2MB speeds.
UPDATE – 2/16/09 – I checked with SprintPCS’s customer service. As I spoke with them I realized that I had been looking at the VOICE coverage, not the DATA coverage. The Data map indicated that I was not in a broadband area but in a Sprint Network area. IOW, 150K or so was what I should expect. On the other hand, this isn’t bad coverage considering the mountainous nature of the terrain in the area. SO, if you are checking coverage for data, make sure you are looking at the data map and not the voice map