Travel to Mexico

[larrydenier]

I just got my Tap.  planning a trip to Mexico next week.  Will it work done there?

thanks

[renegade600]

dont see why it wouldn't as long as you have access to wifi.

[DParker]

The real question is, can you get useful results with the following?:

"Alexa, dos cervezas, por favor."

Report back with your findings.  You know, for science and stuff. 

[mike27oct]

I traveled last weekend with my Tap from Seattle area to Portland, OR area, 200 miles away and stayed in a large major "convention" hotel.  The hard part was connecting the Tap to the hotel Wi-Fi; the kind that sends you to a webpage where you have to "Agree" to the terms of use.  First, the Wi-Fi signal was too weak in the room (what else is new about hotel Wi-Fi?), and it took a few tries to have my Agree, accepted.  Finally got on, and all worked well once I found a place in the room where Wi-Fi was strong enough to stay connected.

Travel tip: Be sure to completely turn off Tap before packing it (by holding power button in for 3 secs and hear the tone). Turn it completely off before leaving hotel room each time; saves battery.  Keep it in a safe.  Best tip of all:  Leave the Tap at home; you have other options (e.g. cell phone and inexpensive BT speaker.) rather than taking it along to Mexico.  It could get stolen there!

[mike27oct]

Been there, done that.  In fact, I bring a small dual-band range extender that is set up as an AP and fed by a router port, so I would have 5G signal instead of lousy/slow 2.4G which I hardly use at home anymore. Although, the home Echos don't require 5G, so they all are on 2.4G.   Most everything else is wired or on 5G.

The problem today is nobody has Ethernet connections anymore; they all have crummy Wi-Fi.  The last place I saw Ethernet was in the Aria hotel in Vegas two years ago, and the bandwidth is so cripple, it was worthless.  Even the bed and breakfast places only have Wi-Fi now.  I will be staying in a new one next month so will bring my range extender with me -- just in case there is a router exposed to connect to.

[iolinux333]

Yes hotel Wi-Fi it's a disaster lately since everybody wants to watch Netflix all night making it useless until 4am.

[mike27oct]

The main problem with hotel Wi-Fi is they don't want to spend the money to create decent Wi-Fi throughout, by 1) buying faster bandwidth like I have at home, and 2) they don't put enough antennas around the hallways.  I can measure 25-30 Mbps outside one room, and two doors away either side, the bandwidth is 2-5 Mbps.  I always seem to get the room with 2-5 Mbps!

Because of this, I usually cannot stream from home server, so I always travel with a wireless hard drive with music and movie files on it so we can enjoy listening to the BT speaker, or new Tap, or watch a movie on the iPads in the evening if we want to.