Marina Bay Sands, facing the Apple Store. Image: Apple.
Ookla recently published an Asia Pacific speed test report targeting business travellers in our region, with some surprising results to show.
Its March 2025 report, Wi-Fi Performance in Luxury Hotels Across APAC’s Top Business Hubs, took stock of Wi-Fi performance at select 5-star hotels in the Asia Pacific region. The speed tests focused solely on download speeds accessible by the hotel’s guests and were conducted over 12 months in 2024.
The report shortlisted four of the most well-known 5-star hotels in the destinations popular for APAC business travellers: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Bali, Sydney, and, of course, Singapore.
While the list of APAC 5-star hotels featured feels inconclusive, Singapore’s selected representatives are still extremely well-known properties. They include Raffles Singapore, Marina Bay Sands, The Fullerton Hotel Singapore, and InterContinental Singapore. Ookla said that they excluded hotels that did not have enough test samples available.
This list of hotels were selected by Ookla, based on their popularity among business travellers and also having sufficient test samples across its 12-month test period. Source: Ookla.
Per Ookla’s findings, The Peninsula Tokyo is in a distant first place with 188.57Mbps, which is 2.67 times faster than MBS’s (70.51Mbps) and a whopping 9.41 times faster than InterContinental Singapore’s (20.03Mbps).
Singapore’s selected 5-star hotels were ranked 11th (MBS), 14th (The Fullerton Hotel Singapore), 19th (Raffles Singapore), and 20th (InterContinental Singapore), in this list of selected 20 hotels.
Aside from MBS, which Ookla categorised as a “good performer” (50 to 100Mbps tested), the others were categorised as “lagging performers” (less than 50Mbps tested).
Ookla stated that anything below 50Mbps can “impact business travellers” because fast Wi-Fi is necessary for online meetings, massive file transfers, or streaming work applications (such as a corporate VPN, for example).
The speed tests submitted to Ookla across these hotels were done on wireless networks accessible by the guests, which are mainly Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6 networks. Image: Ookla.
It also noted that the speeds were largely dependent on how advanced the Wi-Fi standards were in each hotel (i.e. whether the hotels use Wi-Fi 4, 5, 6, and 7). Ookla said that 80% of its top performers’ tests were detected on Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6, while the “lagging performers” were primarily found to be using Wi-Fi 4 and Wi-Fi 5 connections (77.7%).
Can we do better than a 5-star hotel?
If you want to know how to make your Wi-Fi perform better, you can check out our following Wi-Fi 7 guides:
Source: Ookla
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