Brian Jepson’s Weblog

AT&T’s mMode plans max
out at a measly 8MB a month, but I stumbled across their mobile
internet plans, which are oriented to business users, and offer
20MB for $39.99 ($2 per MB over that). No flat rate plan yet (Sprint
and Verizon offer unlimited CDMA plans for about $80 a month), but
this is still an improvement. (On my old mMode plan, 20MB would cost
me my $19.99/8MB fee + 12MB at $6.14/MB = $93.67!)

It’s been a beautiful weekend, and I even managed to get out of the
house. This morning, while Joan and I were heading down to the tennis
courts at URI to knock some tennis balls around (I wouldn’t call it
playing yet, since we don’t keep score and I can’t sustain a volley
very long without twisting my ankle or hitting the ball out of the
court), I got the idea to go from cafe to cafe, take some photos, and
do some wireless (CDMA and GPRS) performance measurements (signal
strength, sustained download speed, traceroute output, etc.)

I’m pretty sure that there are no cafes down here with Wi-Fi, but
maybe a survey like this would give people some ideas. South County is
positively beautiful, especially this time of year, and the past
decade or so has seen an emergence of some decent coffeeshops down
here. Now all I need is some decent connectivity when I’m out of the
house.

Even a local like me misses a couple of cafes, and I was surprised to
see a new(?) one last night when Joan and I were returning from
drinking margaritas on the deck of Hanson’s Landing; I don’t remember
the name of it (damn tequila), but it was Java something, and it was
right in the Salt Pond marina area. So, here’s my incomplete list:

• Sophie’s on Route 2
• 193 Degrees at the URI Memorial Union
• Bagelz in the Kingston Emporium
• Eclectibles on Robinson Street
• that place I just noticed near Salt Pond
• Wickford Gourmet

If you have any additions, please send them on to me
(replace the “+at+” in the email address with you-know-what)
and I’ll update the list (and if you know of any
Wi-Fi enabled Cafes down here, you’d be making my
day/week/month/year). If you want to join me for the crawl, let me
know. I plan to do it sometime this week (May 12th-16th), because I
only have my CDMA loaner card from Sprint for another two weeks. I’m
actually hoping that there will be enough places I didn’t know about
that I’ll need to span two days with this project