coverage mapWe like CafeNet at the Welling­ton­ista, yes we do. But it’s not always an unqual­i­fied feel­ing. Most­ly it works well once you find a hotspot — and more arrive all the time. But some­times, and with some devices, things aren’t so rosy.

At this Welling­ton­ista’s risk of sound­ing like a spoiled geek whose new toy won’t do what it says on the box, it seems that iPods Touch and iPhones don’t always have an easy time con­nect­ing to CafeNet. And it’s not just this writer’s expe­ri­ence — oth­ers have noticed it too.

Part­ly this is the fault of the devices them­selves — web pages and help files for con­nect­ing Jesus phones and their cut-rate Touch brethren to wi-fi are legion.

Here in Welling­ton on CafeNet though, the prob­lems are con­sis­tent and repro­ducible, appar­ent­ly depend­ing on which par­tic­u­lar hotspot you attempt to con­nect to. Most hotspots around town seem to give users via DHCP the same IP address and router (nice piece of behind the scenes mag­ic, that).

A few oth­ers seem to be con­fig­ured dif­fer­ent­ly, and appear only to pass an IP address with­out a router address, lead­ing to the frus­trat­ing sit­u­a­tion of the iPhone/iPod Touch being con­nect­ed the hotspot but being unable even to reach the CafeNet home­page to authen­ti­cate.

Hav­ing tried to inter­est the CafeNet helpdesk in this with­out too much suc­cess per­haps the best mit­i­ga­tion for now is to map the prob­lem — con­tri­bu­tions wel­come. Using this map iPhone/iPod Touch users may be able to find known good hotspots, and avoid the frus­tra­tion of mis-behav­ing toys.

[It must also be said that these sorts of prob­lems do not seem to be report­ed by peo­ple using oth­er kinds of wi-fi enabled devices on CaféNet; and for the most part CaféNet works well for iPhone/iPod Touch users.]