Truck and Barter

Sweet Fannie Adams!

There's a whole subculture out there wandering around with their laptops, mulling over their own willingness to pay for the T-Mobile Hotspots at the Starbucks that are, almost assuredly, just a few doors down from Panera.

Ah, I went to Borders, where t-mobile was offering a free day pass and a $20 Borders gift certificate for signing up for monthly service, which I will have to use anyway at my current location.

Panera is just too far for hit-or-miss wireless.

The Panera in Tyson's Corner, VA is just down from a Starbucks, but closer still to a Kinko's -- which also has the T-Mobile network service.

The last four times I have been in that particular Panera, I've wound up using the T-Mobile network because the Panera one was kaput. Maybe I'm just fantastically unlucky with that particular location, but given their inability to keep Orange Scones in stock there (or get my order right on the first try, ever), I question the competence of the entire Tyson's Corner operation.

I've never found the T-Mobile network completely out of commission, and it seems to be faster and more reliable on a micro level, too. Transient DNS failures are very common at Panera, and while the network is zippy for more purposes, downloading large files or e-mail attachments takes forever, even in an otherwise-empty restaurant.

It seems strange that there should be a single point of failure at all for a system like Panera's, but then their network was not designed with maximization of revenue (and thus reliability, and utility to the user) in mind. Panera is probably doing slightly less business with the network down, but there's no way for them to accurately account for what this is costing them.

If what I was seeing in Silver Spring MD yesterday is the cause it looked like the authentication server wasn't working. DNS was not working but I dialed up via GPRS and had a working DNS and network connection but it still wouldn't authticate even after I got the 'agree to our terms' page and clicked yes.

Thanks, I thought it was an SP2 - driver - bios related one because I had problems with all three recently.

For emailing a large file (over 100 KB) from Panera with Yahoo, I highly recomend zipping it up. I've had failed uploads trying to email a large civ 3 conqusts pbem file which succeeded as soon as I zipped them up even though the zip was only 10% smaller. (Civ III conquests has their own compression algorithm used.)

As of Tuesday March 8th around 6:15 PM Central Time, their ISPs site blocker was blocking their login page.

Jon,

That last one wins the blue ribbon.