On Wireless Hot Spots
My family and some good friends from Ohio visited Portland, Oregon over the Labor Day weekend. We were in Portland mostly to do a bit of shopping. Favorites for our family are Powell's City of Books and the standalone Powell's Technical Bookstore, Daisy Kingdom, Fry's Electronics, and for our visiting friends, numerous bead stores.
Traveling from the Seattle area, and having lots to see and do, we stayed overnight. I brought my laptop to check email and in case the writing muse hit in force (it didn't - I had such a good time she let me have the weekend off.).
The hotel, a Shilo Inn, did not have high speed Internet access. We had gotten a good holiday weekend rate and the suite was very nice - small table with four chairs, "wet" bar, microwave, small referigerator, and televisions (one in the bathroom) and four phones (one in the bathroom). After settling in for the evening, I dialed in to Earthlink (at least they're enlightened and don't charge for local calls or duration) resulted in a 24 Kbps connection. That's usable, but only just. My web-based mail client just c r a w l e d at times, but I was able to see if I had any critical email messages and compose one to a friend.
The next day, running around town in search of bead stores, we found a good one worthy of a half-hour or so of shopping. There was a nearby Starbucks, and it sported the T-Mobile HotSpot logo. So, I pulled my laptop out of the car, ordered an iced drink from the Starbucks, and set up my laptop outside. As expected, the signal was strong and speeds were very respectable - easily as fast as what I'm used to on my office connection.
The contrast between the dialup experience and the HotSpot experience was stark.
One major factor for me, as a visitor, was the near certainty that the Starbucks had a wireless access point. By accounts, Personal Telco, a community Wireless network, has coverage in parts of the city... just nowhere that I visited in my travels and had time to use my laptop. A perfect place would have been the small park just in front of Powell's Technical Bookstore... but Network Stumbler showed no wireless access points at all. The Starbucks usage cost me a bit over $5.00, which I was happy to pay, and I got done eveything I needed to do in ten minutes or so and had some time for some whimsical email to friends. All in all, it was a very satisfying experience.
Comments are always welcome!
8:37:32 AM 
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