Tuesday, September 11, 2007

robinson's free wifi - going downhill

I used to love sitting in the Cafe Mediterranean in Robinson's Galleria because of the good food, cold beer, and free wifi. I've also used it downstairs, by Bo's cafe. At the time, the wifi signal itself was good. The DNS was slow, as was the actual connection, but I didn't mind since I wasn't downloading huge files anyway. It was a pleasant place to surf and have coffee or a snack.

The wifi at Robinson's Pioneer was always bad, one could use it, but it was intermittent and slow when available.

I recently went to both Pioneer and galleria and checked out the wifi situation (at Cafe Med at galleria, and at Old Spaghetti House at pioneer). The wifi is much worse than it used to be. Possibly the hotspot has been moved at Galleria, but when I was last there, the signal wasn't available at all at Cafe Med. There were some secured networks, but no free wifi. I didn't go to Bo's to test there. It wasn't important enough.

At Pioneer, Old Spaghetti House charges a ridiculous PHP 50.00 per half-hour just for plugging in to the wall. And the wifi was very slow and unstable when I was there and it's completely down now (right now, my wife is meeting a fellow developer there). We liked the coffee and dessert at Old Spaghetti House, but the cost of plugging in is sufficiently stupid that I believe I'm going to tell anyone interested about how Old Spaghetti House is extremely unhospitable to laptop warriors. I think it's great that they have wall plugs at all. A more reasonable price or policy would be cool. For now though, absent either, the policy is just dumb and I'm not going to give them any of my money again. Although if my wife insists on going there, she can pay for lunch. The creme brulee WAS very good.

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