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.]