My visit to Southern California

by philg

Some work as a software expert witness (on a case regarding a massively parallel database management system patent) took me out to Southern California this week. Here are a few random thoughts occasioned by the trip…

Getting to San Diego is no longer a simple proposition. The shrinking domestic private economy has resulted in a lot of schedule cuts at airlines. Government and health care workers don’t need to travel much; Wall Streeters don’t need to fly out of Boston. Out of all the airlines, there is only one non-stop per day and that left in the morning ($600/seat on JetBlue!), so I connected via Salt Lake City on a couple of Delta flights on Monday afternoon.

I endured two nights at the W Hotel in San Diego, which is notable for its cramped dark overfurnished rooms. I hadn’t taken a close look at the telecommunications charges at the place before, but they struck me this time: $15/day for Internet and about $20 for a five-minute phone call back to Massachusetts (I had brought a Sprint 4G AMOLED Samsung Galaxy S Android phone (very nice device, and I think all phones should have an AMOLED display, but 3X the battery capacity would have been nice), so did not have to contemplate paying these fees). I’m wondering if our inefficient telecommunications infrastructure, particularly in hotels, is impairing economic growth. In 2001 in Singapore I stayed in a hotel with free Internet and calls to the U.S. were just a few cents per minute.

After doing some work in Orange County I wanted to fly back from the John Wayne airport (SNA), but schedule reductions meant that it simply wasn’t possible to get back to Boston without an all-night layover somewhere. Even getting home from LAX would be tough as there was only one nonstop redeye (JetBlue, $600, only middle seats remaining). I rented a Ford car for the one-hour drive to LAX. As with other rentals, this $25,000 product of U.S. industry had no navigation system. Fortunately the Samsung phone was ready with a navigation system that calculated a route to my cousin’s house in Los Angeles. At first it said that the drive would take about one hour, but after checking for traffic corrected that to three hours (I left Orange County around 6:15 pm). I pushed the traffic icon and heard the sad words “no faster route found”.

It actually did take nearly three hours to get to my destination, by which time I was so worn out that I decided to stay overnight in LA ($200 expense at the Sheraton Gateway LAX). After enduring what I assume is typical LA weekday evening traffic I wondered who would want to invest in LA. The traffic makes life there almost as miserable as in a lot of Third World cities (and maybe even as miserable as life in Boston in February), but the potential returns on investment are much lower.

The legacy carriers seem to have given up on the LAX/BOS route, which meant that my choices were Virgin America and JetBlue. Virgin America was much cheaper and had an earlier flight, so I tried it out for the first time. The staff are very friendly and in some small ways it might be better than JetBlue (e.g., I was able to improve my mind by watching The Kids are Alright and The Other Guys (hysterical) on demand). We landed in Boston at the very worst possible time for driving out to the suburbs from the city center (leaving about 5 pm), but there were no delays on the Boston highways. The Border Collie was happy to see me.

9 thoughts on “My visit to Southern California”

  1. Some trips to Southern California go well. I recently went to the Robinson Helicopter Safety Course in Torrance, CA which is just south of LAX. My wife and I flew out of Manchester, NH on Southwest on a flight that stopped in Chicago at Midway but without a plane change. (Note the flights were free as a reward for charging as much as I can on their VISA card) Armed with my 3G iPad, I was able to use it as a GPS for my auto travels in an Alamo rent-a-car. I stayed at the Ramada just across from the factory for only $57/day. Lots of local restaurants to be found. I then drove down to San Diego (a two hour trip) for my daughter’s wedding and the back to LAX for a return flight on Southwest a week later. This one required a change of aircraft in PHX but that was because I wanted a flight later in the day than the one that went without a change of aircraft.
    Flying out of Manchester is always hassle free and only about an hour trip from my home near yours in the Boston suburbs to having parked the car and be at the gate through security.
    The Safety Course was great however Frank did not make an appearance. Saw the R66’s ready to go for the FAA production certificate which they got just after I left. It is amazing that basically chunks of metal and engines arrive at one end of the factory and helicopters emerge at the other end. They actually fabricate virtually everything with fancy numerically controlled tools although the final assembly is by hand. I wound up flying in a factory R44 that had an Aspen Flight Display System. By the way, Robinson will fly you back to LAX at the end of the course if you do not bother with a rent-a-car.

  2. 4240 Google hits for “hotel internet sucks”.
    2 Google hits for “hotel internet rules” (and neither of those is actually from an person being enthusiastic about their hotel internet connection or the pricing thereof).

    Slow/unreliable hotel internet and the fees charged for it are the top complaint of the travelers I’ve talked to recently. It seems like promising and delivering high-quality free wifi internet would be an easy way for any hotel chain to gain a competitive advantage. Of course, many people pick whatever hotel is closest to their main destination, so hotel rooms might not be exchangeable enough for that to work.

    One could even argue that hotels are making us fat because so many people just go to Starbucks to get their wifi fix, and then feel obligated to get a latte.

  3. hotels need to appear competitive on the advertised room rates, so they have to make up that revenue on water bottles, mini bar, pay per view room service, and long distance calls. Now that almost everyone has a mobile phone, nobody uses the phones in the room, and it seems that they have tried to make up that lost revenue by increasing the rates on the poor suckers that still have to use the room phone.

    Short term this might work, but I can only think that people develop very negative images of the hotel, similar to how we feel about banks with their fees, mobile phone carriers when you go over the minutes, etc.

    I am waiting for the day when, upon check in, they offer me, “Sir, for $25, would you like bedbug repellant treatment applied to your room. Of course it is not guaranteed, but you might sleep better”

  4. over on reddit a few days ago a guy who said he installed them explained that it was much much cheaper to do one WIFI install at a starbucks that can serve a bunch of people, than to wire every room in a hotel that likely was not even designed for that originally.

  5. Good point, wally. Larry Page of Google is on video saying “as an engineer” that wifi cannot be expected to penetrate through more than two ordinary walls, since the energy band is so feeble? & is the same wavelength as micro-wave ovens. Thus, when you think wifi is slow because everyone just came home & got online, they may be making nachos. When we were looking at improving wifi reception in a large, well-built 2-storey house, the local head technology guy for Cox told us that wifi penetrates better horizontally than vertically. since then, I have noticed that in other buildings as well.

  6. With the way the economy is going in the Golden State, you would think the traffic problem would be resolving itself? But having driven these routes all my life, yes it is still a b!tch.

    Phil, how fast of a private a/c would it take for you to just fly out yourself?

  8. Edith, you are mostly correct. But horizontal vs vertical doesn’t mean anything to the signal, it is more a function of antenna design and the materials it is trying to pass thru. It might be harder to go thru floors, if they have steel reinforcing, as compared to walls which are probably drywall and wood studs. A bigger factor is probably the router’s antenna is optimized to spread the signal in a horizontal direction. (it is possible to buy specialized antennas that work vertically, but probably cheaper to just add a few consumer type wifi routers).

    Oh, the newer “N” routers are supposed to be better at putting the signal out. Especially the 2×2 MIMO versions, they use two antennas and have fancy DSP algorithms to pick out weaker signals.

    An even better solution might come out in 2011, since the FCC recently ruled that TV whitespaces may be used. That would be at a much lower frequency (unused TV channels), under 600MHz, which will pass thru house walls much easier.

  9. This is getting off topic, but hotels aren’t making us fat. Neither is Starbucks: . We’re making ourselves fat, with our laziness and bad food choices. If hotels offered free wifi we’d probably stay in and order room service. At least going to Starbucks necessarily involves some minimal amount of walking. Maybe they’re keeping us from being even fatter?

Comments are closed.