The Port Orleans resorts are intended primarily as vacation-oriented hotels and as such do not have much by way of commercial or business bureau facilities. You can send and receive faxes via the Front Desk, but that’s about it - there are no guest-accessible PCs, no Wi-Fi network in the lobby nor other business facilities. If you really need these type of services there are other resorts on site - such as the Coronado Springs Resort which includes a conference centre - which might be better suited to your needs.
What you do have available though, if you’ve brought your notebook PC along with you to Walt Disney World, is a broadband connection socket inside your room. At Port Orleans, the HSIA (High Speed Internet Access) connector is located on a flying lead next to the table by the window. There should also be a short ethernet cable provided in the room which can be used to connect up virtually any modern PC. This cable is usually stored in a little bag hung on the clothes rail - don’t lose it or take it home by mistake though, or Disney will charge you $10 for it.
Unlike many hotels in the Orlando area, the internet service is not provided for free - hey, you’re in Disney, remember? OK, to be fair, Disney do contract the service out to a third-party company - SmartCity - and presumably they expect to get a return on their investment in the infrastructure. Connectivity is charged to your room bill at a flat rate of $9.95 per contiguous 24-hour period.
To start using the service, simply hook up your computer to the HSIA socket and start your web browser. A welcome page will pop up, to which you need to click on the “Connect Now” button:
You’ll then get the ubiquitous Terms and Conditions, which you will no doubt read every word and digest every detail before clicking on the “Accept” button:
After a short while, you will be connected to the internet and you can start browsing:
When the access period expires, you will see the login page again and can pay for a further 24-hours whenever you like. To get the most from the service it’s probably best to subscribe around the middle of the day so that you can get access all that afternoon/evening and also the following morning. If you have any problems, Technical Support is available 24 hours a day by touching ‘56’ on your in-room telephone.
The access speed was pretty poor when I last checked it - a maximum of 1 Mbit downloads in October 2007 - but I’ve been hearing a number of reports recently that this has been dramatically improved. One site visitor (Shane Cook, “PezDSpencer” on the DISboards) had a chance to do some tests at Riverside and he got a much faster 6 Mbit download speed. Better still, the upstream speed had increased from 384k to as much as 1.5 meg, which would make uploading digital photos for safe keeping a viable option. His test results in May 2008 were as follows (thanks Shane):
Also, watch out for inactivity timeouts. Rather than connecting you to an in-house network for 24 hours as you might perhaps expect, the service is just like many home broadband modems and the link drops after a few minutes of inactivity. Of course, it does reconnect automatically when you next request a web page, but the temporary “forwarding” message while this happens can mess up some activity - such as posting a message which just took you half an hour to compose on your favourite Disney forum for example. ’Nuff said.
If you don’t want to pay $10 for high-speed access but just want to check a few emails every couple of days, the Port Orleans room telephones have a data socket on the side to which you can attach your own modem cable. Assuming you have a suitably equipped computer and an account with a dial-up internet provider, you can call your ISP’s local or toll-free access number by prefixing the normal dial string with the digit ‘8’ to get an outside line - e.g. 8-1-800-555-1234.
Note: these calls are not completely free when dialled from a Disney resort room phone as there is a 75¢ connection charge for all calls - even supposedly toll-free ones. However you can stay connected for as long as you like, so for 75¢ you’ll get plenty of access time.