I tried to post this review on the site where I booked this hotel, Agoda, but the character limit on their form meant not even half of this would fit. So here’s what I meant to post in full.

If the hotel properly advertised there is no Internet service, then it would have been a reasonable place to stay (though I would not have stayed, as I needed to do some work from the hotel during this rainy week).

The Wi-Fi is terrible at Midtown Richardson Hotel in Taipei. It is so unusable I consider it false advertising the hotel claims to provide free Internet service. It is not only slow it takes several minutes to load a basic web page, if it works at all, but the network is poorly configured as well. I had to implement a DNS hack before my computer could even reach the network login page. (My Android connected fine with respect to the DNS, but it was still just as slow.)

If you do stay here, get used to broken web pages because they will not completely load, and do not even dream of getting work done or watching a video in the lowest possible streaming quality. I should have checked hotelwifitest.com, where I would have seen this hotel is not even listed. I tried to fix that, but the hotel’s Wi-Fi is so bad and misconfigured (maybe intentionally) such that the speed test cannot check the location and cannot even load, meaning the network is worse than terrible. It’s basically nonexistent.

Other annoyances with this hotel:

• None of the electrical outlets hold connected plugs. I needed to stack the teacups underneath charging bricks I plugged in, and then be careful not to move anything. Still, they kept falling out.
• The sink is awkward to use to wash face. I kept hitting my head on the glass shelf.
• Windows were pretty dirty on the outside, but it wasn’t a big deal because there was not much of a view anyway.
• Guests either above or next door return to the room at around 22:00 and start a party, complete with crying babies, all the way past 03:00 in the morning on weeknights.
• The “Do Not Disturb” signal light apparently turns off on its own at around 24 hours, leading to the housekeeping staff entering your room while you are still sleeping because you could not get to sleep until 04:00 due to the partying families.

Good things:

• Some reviews mentioned the shower getting water all over the bathroom. I did not have this problem in family deluxe double double room 0807. The shower contained the water just fine, and the water pressure was good.

Other notes from attempting to list the hotel on hotelwifitest.com

Because the network was not providing location to the browser, I tried to manually spoof the Firefox browser location using instructions found under Manually change your location in Firefox. As part of this, I went to latlong.net and entered Taipei, then clicked the location of hotel on the map to get 25.043888,121.509615.