Disney World, Florida, Internet service, some notes.

I am about to tell you of a little trick. I do not guarantee this will work for you. I can only share with you a situation that we experienced.

Disney World in Florida at the time-share facilities offers Internet service as follows. The cost is about $9.95 for 24 hours contiguous. This means that as soon as you start the service the clock never stops until the 24 hours are up. If you shut down your laptop, the clock is still running. The service charges goes to the final bill for the room. It would be very wise to choose to start your Internet service at a time when you would get the maximum utilization out of it.

We could not find more than one Ethernet port in our apartment. We found our Ethernet wall port next to the kitchen, behind the dining room table along the wall in the bar section, while staying at Old Key West. In All Star Music, we found the port located on the desk in the form of a plastic box. Our apartment offered a single Ethernet cable. Make sure you leave that cable when you check out, as you will be billed for it if it is missing.

Getting the service turned on is quite clever and easy. Just plug your laptop into the room port using the Ethernet cable provided. Open a web browser and up pops a Disney offer to subscribe to the Internet. If the correct web page fails to open, close the Internet browser and then open it up again. You just might have to delete the previous chosen home page from your preference setup so your laptop will better find the Disney logon page. I did not have to do that but I did have to launch my browser twice to get one of my sessions started.

My research of Internet connectivity for the Disney resorts failed to answer all my questions. The Internet sites failed to tell me how the service worked. I decided to take a gamble and take with me, on this vacation, an Ethernet hub with support cables (one short from port to hub and two long cables from hub to laptops). One day on our vacation I decided to subscribe to Disney’s Internet service but before I did, I hooked up the hub to service my laptop and my son’s laptop. After I completed the subscription logon using my laptop, both my son and I experienced good Internet service on the two machines. We figured that this little trick saved us money and this trick rocks when you take into account that there was only one port implying only one computer normally could gain internet connectivity at a time. Evidently, the subscription opens the port to the room and not the individual computer. I just could not believe my luck. Thus, one can save money by hooking up a hub or switch to add service to more than one device from each wall port. Including a port, or switch into your luggage will increase space and weight. Try to find a small lightweight hub. When we returned home, we found that my luggage was over weight. At the Delta check in, I had to quickly move some items out of my suitcase and into my son’s case to avoid a $25 penalty charge for being over 50 pounds.

I do implore everyone not to hook up a wireless unit. That would only call attention to this opportunity to extract improved service and might move Disney to only provide service to individual computers. Let us all keep this little trick a secret – please.