wifi issues

At home with a Linksys 802.11n router, I've never had any problem with Wi-Fi.  My Surface RT connects great.

Took my first vacation with my Surface and it was a Wi-Fi disaster.  Stayed on the 9th floor of Tower 2 in the San Francisco Hilton Union Square for 9 days.  Out of the whole time, I perhaps could connect to Wi-Fi only 2 to 3 times in my 9th floor room.  My Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone connected every time with a reliable, speedy Wi-Fi connection.  (To be fair, my wife's iPhone 5 had intermittent connection problems).  This was AT&T-supplied Wi-Fi and I called the tech company supporting the hotel's Wi-Fi several times but they could never solve my connection problem.

If I went to the hotel lobby, I had no trouble connecting with my Surface tablet.

But then I noticed two other issues that bugged me.  Brilliant idea on Microsoft's part to have the logon screen show your e-mail/Microsoft Internet identity.  Then since the Touch Cover keyboard is so relatively crappy, the only real way to reliable type a complex passwords with lowercase, uppercase (trying to guess where the Shift key is on the Frankenstein keyboard), special characters, punctuation, etc., is to slowly and clearly hunt-and-peck the password.

So there I am in the hotel lobby surrounded by crowds of people because the Surface RT Wi-Fi doesn't work in my room (although my Android phone does), my Microsoft ID shows in nice big letters for anyone looking over my shoulder, and I'm slowly typing out my "secure" complex password.  I guess I could have booted in the Surface in my 9th floor room to avoid security concerns before going to the lobby.

I remember Steve Ballmer dissing the "cheaply made" Nexus 7  tablet and pointing out the much finer workmanship in the Surface RT (in his opinion).  That certainly isn't the case with Surface RT Wi-Fi.  It's crapola.  I installed the April, 2013 Wi-Fi update while staying at the hotel and that didn't help a bit.  Maybe Microsoft should give us brave souls that plunged for the Surface RT 1.0 tablet a sweet trade-in/trade-up to the next Surface RT tablet that hopefully fixes all the things they overlooked 1st time around.  Laggy performance, Wi-Fi that doesn't always work, etc.

In making a purchase at the Microsoft kiosk in the Westfield Shopping Center down on Market Street in SF, I remarked to the Microsoft staff about the Wi-Fi problems I was having.  The person helping me had obviously never heard of Surface RT Wi-Fi issues.  I was kinda hoping he'd say, "Bring it in.  We'll take a look at it."  Instead, he said just said he'd used his Surface at a variety of hotels and never had a problem.  When Microsoft has already issued several updates addressing Wi-Fi, you'd hope that their store staff would be better informed.

Next vacation, I'll probably take my Nexus 7 tablet and leave my Surface RT at home.  When I did get home, my Surface did connect straight away to my home Wi-Fi router with no problem.