I don’t do a lot of work-related travel, not like some people I know. Still, several times a year, I find myself on the road. Having a nice hotel room is good. Restaurants are a plus. Wi-Fi is a necessity.

Back in the 1980s, I sported a laptop bag that had a hacker’s toolkit. It was basically a set of alligator clips and wires on one end. The other end was a standard phone jack. In order to get on the Internet in one hotel, I had to unscrew the phone wall plate and connect the alligator clips to the phone line. I could then plug in my laptop and use it’s modem. I felt like James Bond!

Actually, I felt like a dork: The wires were too short, so I had to lie on the floor to use the laptop and its modem. Worse: I really didn’t have any serious email to pick up. I probably paid $13 for the phone call back to my local ISP just to get a bunch of spam. But like many hackers, I did it because it was fun and I could.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, hotel rooms would come with “modem” jacks on the in-room phone. (I just checked the phone in my hotel room — where I’m writing this blog post — and it still has a “modem” jack for a dial-up connection.)

Starting in the 2000s, hotel rooms began featuring an Ethernet port. That was something! I really enjoyed finding that connection on the teensy work desk.

Yes, you had to bring your own cable, which I always did. Then the hotels started stocking 6-foot Ethernet cables in the closet, right next to the ironing board and iron.

Then came Wi-Fi.

Today, just about every hotel features Wi-Fi. The high-end hotels offer it free. Cheap-o motels charge you. The only problem with the Wi-Fi is that it’s often dreadfully slow.

The signal could be slow from all the connections. Even if my room, I had my phone, tablet, and laptop hooked up to the Wi-Fi. Imagine having some vacationers, complete with teenagers, phones for everyone, plus a few laptops and tablets. That’s a lot of connections!

The problem isn’t really the connections, but rather the throttling taking place on purpose. I noticed upon connecting that a proxy redirection thing was downloaded to my laptop. When I tried to open multiple browser windows, they all stopped working. So as long as I limited my connections, the system worked, albeit dog slow.

When I really needed a connection, such as working on Google Docs or doing something vital like reading Facebook, I tethered my phone’s 4G connection. That worked like a champ.

Still, the situation is far better than it once was. At least i’m not lying on the floor with alligator clips fussing over a 56Kbps dial-up service to read my weekly load of SPAM. Things have changed.