One weekend, I had arranged to meet some family in the centre of Swansea for a spot of shopping. This in itself isn’t noteworthy, but I had decided to head into town over an hour before they were due to arrive. Why? Because I wanted to find out about the internet access at Starbucks.
Really. I’m a feeble person that loves technology so much, I’m willing to investigate things like this. And I wanted a coffee.
Starbucks (And other places of varying refreshment methods) offer internet access at their cafes for patrons to use and abuse. Using the wonders of Wifi technology, you can connect your laptop, Mac or Nintendo DS to the great network whilst downing a large mug of something random from the menu.
This time, I went for some frothy white hot chocolate, with a ton of cream on the top.
Starbucks in the UK use T-Mobile’s Hotspot service, which oddly works quite well and is fairly simple to work out how to use.
For the PC it’s basically:
For the Mac, it’s:
You then must visit any website you can, and you will get automatically diverted to a page showing various options for payment. Sadly, these various options boiled down to using a credit card, but there is a good choice of what you could buy.
If I didn’t have broadband at home, and travelled a lot as part of my job, I would seriously consider the subscription option, since telephony could be replaced by Skype quite easily. The speed isn’t as great as it could have been for the price, but for a quick “I need to get online to do something, but the local internet cafe is too far away”, it’s good enough for me.
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