It’s ‘girl’s weekend’ at my house, (3 women + their 7 daughters under 5!) , so I got greenlit to get a hotel for the weekend and chill! I booked the Stamford Plaza Hotel on Summer St., a former Sheraton now under new management.

I didn’t want to go far or pay alot of money, I just wanted a decent place to stay close to home where I could work and relax. After scanning Expedia and almost booking the Stamford Marriott ($109/night), I decided for once I was going to roll the dice and try one of those ‘unpublished rates’ – you know, where they offer you a super-low rate IF you book without knowing what hotel it is first (like Priceline).

Frankly, I would normally *never* do this, unless, say, it was for an overnight stay on a road trip and they promised me a 3-star and the next option was twice as much. But I was intrigued, and convinced I could figure out which hotel it was before booking.

It was described as a 3.5 star hotel, and I used the other amenity clues they gave me to narrow down the list of their ‘published rate’ hotels to about 4. The giveaway was an amenity ‘tennis nearby’ – that had to be unique – it was – unique to The Stamford Plaza, which had good reviews. I was sure of it, so I booked it, and was rewarded with a $59/night rate – $50 less a night than the Stamford Marriott. Nice!

The first thing you notice walking into the Stamford Plaza is that it is big. The atrium reminded me of the Las Vegas Luxor – while it obviously was not that big, the size is impressive. It is also meticulously clean, and rather quiet. I suspect the hotel is largely supported by traveling staff and events for their next-door neighbors, GE Asset Management, which is how they could afford keeping their superdomish atrium air conditioned.

The Plaza is also very clean, without exception, and check-in was quick and staff helpful and polite.

The one issue I had was with parking – you have to check-in before you park, as you need your room key to get into the parking garage. No big deal, but the street to the parking garage has several gratuitously huge speed bumps which scratched the bottom of my car – and from the looks of the tops of them, many other cars as well. They are just too high and too many. I am glad I would not be going to and from the hotel frequently.

I did, however, get a spot right next to the elevator, as the massive parking garage was barely populated. Parking is $10/day for guests (The Stamford Marriott is $12).

Although it seemed the hotel was lightly booked, they assigned me a room as far from the elevator as possible, which was really annoying and puzzling – because, again, the hotel is pretty big.

While I knew from the atrium that I was going to be fine staying at the Stamford Plaza, I was still taken aback with how nice the room was. It was very standard-sized – the bathroom a little smaller than most, but very tastefully decorated. The couch and coffee table were a plus.

My only complaint was the 20-inch CRT TV – although most hotels have been very slow on the upgrade to flat screens, so this was no surprise.

Although I had a very strong wireless signal, the speed was disappointing, about .3 Mbps. I couldn’t get the wired ethernet connection to work, but didn’t care enough to call the desk for help either.

Regardless, overall, this place was a lot better than I expected and I can heartily recommend the Stamford Plaza as a super value hotel (even the published rate was only $89/night). I don’t know how to describe it, but it has that atmosphere of ‘chain buyout’ – there are giveaways, like the canvas sign on the front with the logo that looks kinda-like-but-not-really Sheraton’s – but that’s not a negative, the owner is towing the line well and in exchange you get a great room at a great price.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Stamford Plaza Hotel Review

 
When I moved to Connecticut from California, I made sure that my new home had Verizon FiOs. FiOs is the promised land, where the phone company drags optical fiber all the way to your doorstep, your bandwidth isn’t shared by your neighborhood, and reliability and service are features you can say aloud without laughing.

To tell you the truth, after 3 years of enjoying FiOs, that’s exactly what Verizon delivered.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, my FiOs was out cold. I called tech support, which answered relatively promptly, and went through the obligatory motions of re-trying everything I had already tried twice. No dice. 

Two hours later, a Verizon service tech named Steve was leaving my house, new router in place and everything working fine. After a conversation with him about Verizon, I feel better than ever about my service. As a tech, Steve was candidly very impressed with his company, recalling an experience where his bosses would tell him that if there was an outage that required 6 techs in a home – he would get his 6 techs, period. That’s unheard of.

This reminded me of the original rollout of DSL in Silicon Valley, which was so explosively popular and poorly planned that Pac Bell would literally fail to even answer the phone at all (which resulted in a class-action lawsuit).

I can’t speak for Verizon phone, wireless, or DSL service, but as for my FiOs service, its been outstanding.

But probably one of the best features of FiOs is that it is so outstanding, its been forcing Cablevision to actually compete. In other areas of the country, its cable or DSL, and DSL simply can’t compete except on the very lowest tiers.

And so it is that Cablevision has drawn a new line in the sand, by announcing that on May 11th, it will be deploying 101 Mbps ‘Ultra’ internet service throughout its entire service area. As far as I know, its the fastest residential internet available anywhere in the US, employing similar DOCSIS 3.0 technology Japan has enjoyed for years.

Currently, I believe the top speeds for both Cablevision and FiOs are around 50 Mbps. But even my 25/25 Mbps service from FiOs is $70 a month, so $99 is going to be a value any way you slice it.

I’m tempted to switch, but it would be more of a ‘hey-look-what-I got’ service more than anything else.

With 25 Mbps service (and even lower), streaming HD video from Amazon or Netflix is a pretty seamless experience to begin with, and I am totally fine with the rare super-big download taking a while.

Also, from experience I can tell you that 25 Mbps is a tough speed to realize in practice due to the ‘long fat pipe’ problem (which I discuss in my FiOs Optimization Guide). Basically, any given connection from your computer to another on the internet needs to go through several hops and routes, slowing it down. In my experience, in order to actually get 20 Mbps+ speeds, you really need to use a download accelerator which saturates your bandwidth using multiple connections, or use other apps which work similarly, such as BitTorrent.

But here’s the real catch: from what I understand, Cablevision is really pushing its limit on what it can do with its current equipment at 101 Mbps. Any faster, and they may need to start stealing bandwidth from its TV lineup, which is unlikely.

On the other hand, Verizon FiOs can turn on speeds of up to 400 Mbps *tommorrow* with its current equipment (well, except that in order to get speeds over 90 Mbps, they are going to have to replace my router with one featuring Gigabit ethernet ports).

With this in mind, its inevitable that FiOs will respond in kind to the new Cablevision move with a competitive tier soon anyway. 

I called Cablevision yesterday, and as expected, you cannot schedule an appointment yet for 101 Mbps service. I was impressed, however, that the representative actually knew what I was talking about. She has promised to give me a callback when its available in my area, as she expressed concern that it would probably be a phased rollout by neighborhood.

I am also interested to see if Cablevision distributes new equipment with Gigabit Ethernet ports, as this would be required to actually see 101 Mbps speeds.

I know alot of people will argue that because of bandwidth sharing intrinsic to Cable internet, that no one will ever see actual speeds of 101 Mbps either way. But in my experience with cable, it will be ‘very close’, and the variance throughout the day will be negligible, although some neighborhoods will be worse than others, Any way you slice it, however, it’s likely to be the fastest home internet in the country by a large margin, and definitely the best value on on Mbps-per-dollar basis.

Any way you slice it, this is a win for consumers, as Cablevision has set a very high bar.

Originally appeared on: StationStops - Metro-North Train Schedules and NYC Commuting Blog See the original post here: Cablevision Launches 101 Mbps Internet on May 11th For $99