Panera's Wi-Fi Down Nationally

By Kevin

There are about 6 weeks left before my dissertation must be defended; I have traveled to NY so my mother can babysit while I write. And write I did, as Panera Bread's free Wi-fi service is down in every store nationally. It has been out since yesterday, and though leaving me with no distractions, greatly inconveniencing me.

There is no alert on Panera's webpage, the store managers here are clueless, and tech support was unhelpful. At least the latter removed the silly recorded warning message they had up yesterday: "we expect to have this resolved as soon as possible", or something very close.

Also, after living away from Long Island for about 5 years, I can finally hear the LI accent. Wow.

-- March 3, 2005 1:33 PM |

Comments

Ian wrote:

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.

-- March 3, 2005 4:35 PM ∞

Kevin Brancato wrote:

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.

-- March 3, 2005 8:22 PM ∞

Tino wrote:

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.

-- March 3, 2005 8:24 PM ∞

Paul Johnson wrote:

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.

-- March 3, 2005 11:37 PM ∞

Jon Nunn wrote:

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.)

-- March 7, 2005 5:36 PM ∞

Jon Nunn wrote:

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

-- March 9, 2005 9:37 AM ∞

Kevin Brancato wrote:

Jon,

That last one wins the blue ribbon.

-- March 9, 2005 12:01 PM ∞

Anonymous wrote:

What is all your jargon about?

-- January 21, 2006 10:08 AM ∞

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