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Wellington Wifi

Since I made the rash decision to cancel my home internet connection1 I've found my digital-self surviving on the charity of friends and the meagre public wifi offerings.

Since there's nothing motivates like vested personal interest I thought I'd seize the moment to document what I've learned. There are three main types of wireless connectivity available to the public: free and community wireless, commercial wireless and mobile broadband (cellular).

Any updates would be gratefully received.

"Free" Wifi Locations

Because "free"2 is the onlymost interesting category I've made a Google map which shows all the public wifi locations that I'm currently aware of: http://tinyurl.com/wellywifi

Community Wifi Locations

Since my work with Personal Telco and Wireless Commons projects, community wireless has a place special in my heart. I'm very pleased that Wellington has an active community wireless project called The Free Net.

They have a reasonable number of nodes around downtown Wellington (and one as far away as Paraparaumu). It doesn't cost any money but they block you if you use more then 500MB in a day or 1GB in a month (see their terms of use).

Like all community groups it only works if you join in and help! Participating is easy, it costs less then NZD$100 to buy the hardware to help spread the network.

A map of all the available locations is available: http://p7.meraki.com/network/aotearoa

Commercial Wifi

I'm not very impressed with any of these offerings. They are all expensive and surprisingly unreliable.3

The only one I've used with any regularity is CafeNet. I'm sad to report that it's outrageously expensive, connectivity drops out regularly and their billing system is "surprising". Twice, despite regularly checking, I've had my balance go from significant credit to negative in less then a minute. When I contacted their support email asking for clarification about what happened, I got a response from Inspire (who I guess they outsource to) which basically said, "yeah you used a bunch of data really quickly". Which is crap, I can't only assume that there's a lag behind their billing system and the access point or that my browser was caching the page results (I was shift-reloading!). Regardless it means that you can't trust the only method you have for checking your usage.

Mobile Broadband, Really?

There are two cellular providers in New Zealand, Vodafone and Telecom. While a different sort of provider, I'm including them because to my utter amazement they are actually cheaper then the commercial wifi providers. There are some important caveats for this type of connection which will make it unsuitable for some:

  • requires a mobile plan and a 3G capable device
  • slower (though still usable)
  • most importantly your data allowance disappears at the end of every month

On the plus side it'll work almost anywhere in New Zealand!

Just to give you an idea of the price comparisons, as of March 2010 here's how it stands. For each company I've used the cheapest data based option:

  • Vodafone - $0.03/MB ($69.95/2048MB)†
  • Telecom XT - $0.06/MB ($29.95/500MB)†
  • Zenbu - $0.10/MB (flat rate)
  • CafeNet - $0.22/MB ($80/350MB)
  • Tomizone - $3/hour (no data based rate)
  • Telecom - $9.95/hour (no data based rate)

† This is a monthly allowance, any left over data disappears at the end of each month.

Update Apr 16: Removed individual entries and embedded map instead. Update Mar 31: Added notes about Airport bus and fixed the bus number.
Update Mar 26: Added Esquires Coffee and Loaded Hog
Update 8:00PM: Added information about The Free Net

  1. It's been an interesting decision and learning experience, however hindsight being what it is … a month before leaving on a world trip was the wrong time for the experiment!
  2. The air quotes around "free" indicate that it either costs nothing or is available for some nominal fee (eg. the expectation of being a customer).
  3. What's with the websites, yuck. CafeNet looks like something out of the '90s, Zenbu makes you go to their FAQ for pricing and neither Tomizone or Zenbu allow you to link to just the Wellington nodes. Telecom forces you to download a PDF for a map (which based on the URL, hasn't been updated since 2007) and most of their internal links point to URLs which no longer exist. Way to go guys.