Premier Inn Paddington Station Wi-Fi

The free wifi service at all Premier Inns is notoriously bad (and I speak from experience), but you can upgrade to their "Ultimate Wifi" by paying a small fee (I think it's £5 a day). I usually do this because I spend a lot of time on my laptop in the hotel. https://www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk/help-and-advice/technical-support/virgin-wifi-premierinn-ultimate.html

If you have a Premier Plus room, the Ultimate Wifi is included in the price.

In my experience, the standard Premier Inn WiFi is okay for checking emails and websites but no good for anything like videos or streaming. It also has an annoying habit of making you reconnect regularly. This is true of all PIs, not just Paddington. I’ve always found it just about adequate for personal use but I’ve paid for the better service if I needed it for work meetings, etc. The paid-for wifi usually works just fine.

It also has an annoying habit of making you reconnect regularly.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that! Ugh, so annoying.

Thanks, Mardee and Golden Girl, that info helps. I had concerns that people were saying that even the paid for wifi wasn’t working well and that, in addition, they also had very bad cell service.

We’re still trying to figure out whether we’ll stay here or at the other hotel we have reservations with. We’ve stayed there before and know that things operate pretty well there, but we’d definitely save some money if we stayed at the Premier Inn, which is definitely an attractive prospect.

I stayed at the Paddington Basin Premier Inn last April and I am staying again for a few days Oct/Nov. It is a nice PI if a Paddington location works for you. I usually like to stay in another neighborhood but for these trips it works best for me.

The wifi like other PI's does annoyingly make you reconnect often as others have said. But I do find it adequate for sending off my family and friends travel blog with lots of pictures attached.

The Cell phone service would have nothing to do with the hotel but rather with nearby towers, in the centre of London it is not credible that cell service would be bad.

It may be inconvenient, but there is free wifi on Paddington station (which is pretty good), and any local cafe will have free wifi.

I am not seeing wifi mentioned on TA reviews. Most of those mention about the slow breakfast service. To which my reaction is that people would whinge about it if large amounts of food were left under the heat lamps. As it is PI does small batch cooking anywhere to keep the food hot and fresh.
A true case of it is impossible to win with some people.

Any large building needs to have some sort of internal mobile phone network to ensure good coverage. Anywhere like a shopping mall, airport or hotel will have to pay to have a network installed. If you think about the internal size of such buildings and the number of people wanting to use the signal all in one place you can see that the main masts outside would not be adequate. So this is something the PI needs to address.

Premier Inn Wi-Fi is borderline unusable. But, you can upgrade it to simply dreadfully bad for a fee. With the normal Wi-Fi, it will be a struggle to open Google Maps. It's that slow.

You can no longer really rely on getting Wi-Fi. You need to get mobile data through an E-Sim, your phone carrier, a physical sim card you buy, etc. These options are usually very affordable, ~$10-20 for 10-30 days. Don't even worry about hotel Wi-Fi, it's not worth the hassle.

I would get a local SIM from one of the big companies: Vodafone, Three, O2 etc. Wi Fi at PI has always been decent for me though, but London is so busy that service in general (even with a Three or Vodafone SIM) is not always consistent.

Premier Inn Wi-Fi is borderline unusable. But, you can upgrade it to simply dreadfully bad for a fee. With the normal Wi-Fi, it will be a struggle to open Google Maps. It's that slow. You can no longer really rely on getting Wi-Fi. You need to get mobile data through an E-Sim, your phone carrier, a physical sim card you buy, etc. These options are usually very affordable, ~$10-20 for 10-30 days. Don't even worry about hotel Wi-Fi, it's not worth the hassle.

plectrude, I disagree. The basic (free) wifi at Premier Inn is painstakingly slow, but it's fine for checking email and a little web surfing. And the upgrade is not dreadful. I've used it in at least 4 or more PIs over the last few years and it's been decent. I've downloaded photos from my phone and uploaded them to my blog without any problems. For an extra £5 a day, it's certainly functional.

The problem with getting mobile data through an eSIM, SIM card or phone carrier is that it uses up a lot of mobile data, so you either run out or you pay more to top it off. There's no need for that. Unless you are doing something like gaming or complicated business work, you really don't need more than what most hotels provide.

OK, I knew I’d read something about this.

I’ve been staying at the new Premier Inn Hub Paddington Station, and sure enough the WiFi was not working for a large part of my stay. Not just “famously bad Premier Inn WiFi” but not working at all. Zilch. And there was virtually no mobile phone signal either in my room (a lot of the Hub rooms are in the basement). One bar at most. Worrying and frustrating to feel completely out of contact from family.

So yeah, the OP was absolutely correct.