Bo's Cafe

I'm at Bo's cafe in Cagayan de Oro. There are several. I'm at the one on Velez street. They've got free wifi, but you need to get a login/password when you buy something, and the authorization times out after (I think) 30 minutes.

This sucks. Now I need to download my email over the vpn in 30 minutes. I can't do things in a leisurely manner, so now I'm going to saturate their bandwidth as much as possible because I need to get done within the timeout. That's not even antisocial behavior because this policy pisses me off. It's just practicality. I need to suck as much data down as I can while the connection is available.

On the other hand, *this* post is here because the policy pisses me off :-). I don't come to CDO very often, so it'll be a while before I can correct this post if the policy changes, and if I notice, if I come back to Bo's. Frankly, that's not too likely since apparently other restaurants and bars in CDO do provide free and unencumbered wifi. I'm going to one of those, but I won't mention names until I actually test the service.

I'm looking at the bandwidth load I'm putting on the link and the link seems to be relatively unstable. In any case nload indicates that I get speeds between 5kBps and 50kBps but it's more on the low end. This is at 10AM on a Sunday with no one else using the wifi here as far as I can tell. I can't get any sustained downloads (but that's because I'm downloading POP3 email over the vpn, the small email sizes make tcp setup and teardown much larger parts of the equation). Hmmm, let me try a youtube video.

OK, bandwidth is pretty good then. With a youtube video downloading, nload says it was able to sustain downloads at around 70kBps.