By now regular readers know that I spend a lot of time in hotels. Not only that, but I also find myself frequently critiquing hotel AV installations.

Last week I was in Calgary (again), and for the sake of variety stayed at a different hotel than I normally do, where I discovered the latest entry in my ever-expanding collection of bad installs.

But before I get to that, some background: The quality of hotel WiFi runs the gamut from decent to poor.

And oddly, there’s an inverse correlation between the expense of a hotel and the quality of it’s WiFi. In my experience swanky hotels and resorts have terrible WiFi connectivity, while budget chains have secure, blazingly fast WiFi.

I have no idea why that is, it’s just something I’ve observed.

Because I’m so dependent on Internet for my work (no, really) I carry a CradlePoint CTR-BC5 mobile wireless router in my travel bag, and plug in to my hotel room’s Network port to make my own WiFi zone, rather than rely on the hotel’s often shaky WiFi network.

With that in mind, imagine my surprise when I unpacked in my hotel room, and found this:

Whoever had wired this hotel terminated the Network ports with RJ11 ports instead of RJ45, so my Network cable wouldn’t fit.

Even if I had thought to pack an RJ11 cable in my bag (and really, why would I?) there’s certainly no guarantee that the port was even terminated behind the plate at all, let alone correctly.

This encounter is Exhibit A in “Why Commercial Clients Shouldn’t Go With The Lowest AV Bidder.”