Somewhat unbelievably (to me at least) there is still wireless in my mother’s backyard and it has only gotten better and stronger. But let’s face it, writing in garden lounge chairs among the frogs, birds, sun, rain and wind are sub-optimum for thinking and writing, so I am always looking for good and, most especially, gratis wireless.
I was pretty psyched to find a new cafe, Camilles Cafe that had decent looking food and proudly advertises Free WiFi. So I went there this afternoon, ordered my cafe con leche, sat down, and ran dhlcient to get my IP address and it served me one in a jiffy. I opened my xchat, said hello to my fellow chatters, and then proceeded to login to my email and I never got further than that because they disabled access to any page that requires a password.
I went up to the counter to ask why and the answer I got was “porque un hacker nos ataco.” It is totally retarded that the can’t reenable whatever they turned off after adding some basic security measures. They are losing tons and mean tons of business. One quick visit to the “other” cafe down the street with free wireless Me. Starbucks shows there is much business to be made if you provide free wireless.
It is Sunday and there are 12 people here with computers and people of all stripes and backgrounds and they come because the wireless is cheap and fast.
Be warned: logging on to the wireless here is totally non-obvious. When you try to log in, you are routed to a corporate Centennial web page that asks for an user-id/password or asks you to create one. So you of course think that it will cost money to do so. But in fact you just create a name, password etc. and then the site never asks you for mullah (nice). There is no sign, instructions, giving you these instructions. You gotta know or you gotta ask one of your neighbors.
This odd system has been in place for years and I just wonder when the only free wireless in a coffee shop (at least that I know of) will be snatched away. Hopefully never and hopefully someone else will get the bright idea that if they open another coffee shop and also provide free wireless, they will make a killing. This place is always always, and I mean always, packed.
p.s.: make sure to bring headphones/music too unless you are great at working with plently of background noise, which includes the usual starbucks music (about as good as its coffee, not), people chatting, people video-chatting sans headphones, and people watching shows like South Park. It is downright cacophonous..
I don’t suppose they block SSH or other similar tunneling mechanisms?
Comment by Anonymous — October 7, 2007 @ 11:29 am
Since most (all?) public WLANs are unencrypted anyway, first thing I do after connecting is to fire up my OpenVPN tunnel and to point the default route into the tunnel. It’s simply better that way.
Unfortunately, Free Wireless is still a big big exception in Germany, most operators still want to see money (big money, the 8E/h that T-Mobile charge is actually cheap) for their wireless stuff.
WLAN has become increasingly unimportant since I use UMTS more and more.
Comment by Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber — October 7, 2007 @ 10:09 pm
I am amazed, actually, that more airports have not moved to free wireless too. Given HOW many delays there are, providing free wifi would be a easy and relatively cheap way to placate an angry customer.
Comment by Biella — October 8, 2007 @ 5:30 am
I am amazed, actually, that more airports have not moved to free wireless too. Given HOW many delays there are, providing free wifi would be a easy and relatively cheap way to placate an angry customer.
I imagine most airports in the EU are also closed networks only available when you pay for them…. But I am not sure.
Comment by Biella — October 8, 2007 @ 5:31 am
Starbucks has an entertainment division; they used to just bring you CDs but now they have their own XM station!
Comment by Luca — October 8, 2007 @ 5:08 pm
If Starbucks provides free wireless in Puerto Rico, consider yourself lucky. Here in the continental US, you have to subscribe to a service that costs 30 bucks a month.
Personally, if I wanted to pay yet another monthly fee, I’d seriously look at signing up with a wireless broadband provider and getting Internet access everywhere, not just in Starbucks. It’s more expensive, but would work the 90% of the time that I’m not in a coffee shop of any variety.
Comment by Daniel Burrows — October 9, 2007 @ 6:26 am
That is why I am always amazed that the free wireless exists given that every single other starbucks has no wireless or paid wireless. How and why this is the case would be interesting to find out.
Also there is free wireless in the airport in San Juan. There is a section in American Airlines that has a hotspot and then there is a coffee/snack shop at the Continental terminal that also has free wireless. Better than JFK, which is not even serviced entirely by wireless..
Comment by Biella — October 9, 2007 @ 2:34 pm