Link speed effect

If your hubs/switches are set to 10/half and the NICs are set to 100/full the mismatch will cause the connection to be much slower than if the NIC was set to 10/half.

Another problem, if your switches are set to 100/full, may be with the cables themselves if they are overextended, suffering from EMI, or of substandard quality (or the jacks as well). This will cause problems when trying to use 100/full but will be just fine when using 10/half.

I can think of a couple of other possible issues, but these are the two main and most common culprits I would try to rule out first before troubleshooting further.

Most probably the browsing speed increases because you're getting rid of errors. Error-free links work much better

How's the browsing speed if a guest sets their link speed to 100/half?

If 100/half works it's probably an autonegotiation problem.

If a guest sets their link speed to 100/half and it's still slow you've probably got problems with the cables. The old cat3 stuff works just fine at 10Mb but not so good [if at all] at 100Mb.

Hubs distribute bandwidth across all users so the more users the slower the system. Switches do not, so all users see the full bandwidth.
You should be using autosensing switches in your distribution, and no hubs. But the problem could be related to your Internet supplier who may have the same problem, which is typical of cable systems.

Hubs, by their very nature are only half duplex -- no matter what, they simply are not capable of full duplex. (remember hubs run at the physical layer of the OSI, meaning they are simply re-distributing a common signal to all ports).

Switches are intelligent, they operate at layer 2 (and above). Switches dedicate bandwidth to each port, so you don't have the same thing going on with a hub (which is shared connections). However it also depends on the quality of the switch, amazing how it may seem but believe it or not I actually came across a very cheap switch that didn't support full duplex connections, it is the only switch in my entire career I ran across that was this way -- I was kind of shocked actually.

So verify your hardware first, switch or hub? If hub, I suggest upgrade to all switches. If switch, read up on its capabilities. In the environment you are talking about I'd suggest investing in a quality switch like cisco.

Further more, mentioning Cisco (I'm a big fan of their gear) they suggest that you ALWAYS use auto negotiation on both the nic and the switch to decide the best speed and duplex mode to run. According to tests that Cisco has done along with just the fact that they are THE authority in routing and switching gear in the world, they claim that auto negotiation is the best way to ensure maximum efficiency.

I've ran into this type of problem with 3Com 3300 and 4400 series switches. If I remember correctly, the problem was most severe when the switch and card were both set to auto. (they kept negotiating constantly) If you by chance are using 3Com switches, I'd recommend that you make sure you are on the latest firmware.

J.R. Brown
iAdmin Mobile - Mobile Network Systems Administration
http://www.iAdminMobile.com

Just to follow-up, one thing to note, if you use a hub instead of a switch you may incur additional security risk since a hub sends traffic out all of its ports. Potentially, someone in the hotel could 'sniff' the traffic from the other user?s connections.

J.R. Brown
iAdmin Mobile - Mobile Network Systems Administration
http://www.iAdminMobile.com

A few years late, but this blog is still up. The reason that happens is when your companies infrastructure equipment (switches/routers) are hard coded to 10 mbps 1/2 duplex, and your PC is set to auto or 100 mbps, causes collision. Both sides have to be set to the same speed. So if the infrastructure is set to 1000 MB Full Duplex, your PC environment will have to be set to Auto-negotiate or 1000 MB if your NIC has the option to avoid latency.