on "High Speed"

(screen shot of hotel connection speed)

It has become painfully clear that the meaning of "high speed" with respect to internet connection is being co-opted by hotel franchises as a marketing tool and as a result is fast being cleansed of any valuable meaning. Case in point, I'm in Kansas this weekend for business, but it turns out that Kansas State and U. Kansas both have home football games this weekend and they're both less than an hour's drive of where I am, so the hotels around the area have all been booked solid. Hence, I was forced to take a room at a modest priced hotel (with a poor reputation) but at least they had "high speed internet" so I could get work done, right? This is a business trip, remember.

Not so fast (literally): I'll spare you the rant about the many other issues with this hotel and point you to the screen shot above which shows the speed of my connection (when it actually worked, that is). How does 305kbs download speed count as "high speed"? I hereby call upon the ISO to determine a minimum speed that shall henceforth be the standard for determining whether a connection is "high speed" or not...pretty please?

It will surely embiggen the hearts of my more gentle readers to know that I convinced my company to waive their per diem and find me more suitable lodgings for the remainder of the trip.

NOTE: This is another good example of the commercialization of Google's search engine. Any query with "high speed internet" in it will be riddled with advertisements for service, not discussions about. Yet another reason Google is not a good linguistics research tool. See more discussion here.