Back in the Old Days you could sit just about anywhere in Main Street and have a choice of free wifi to connect to.

I wandered along the street recently with my new smartphone and didn't find one free signal...

Almost all YSW Main Street restaurants have free Wifi, no?

But you need to get the restaurant's Wifi password and a few of them change it quite frequently.

I usually don't bother with free Wifi, as 4G is much faster and I rarely reach my "fair use" limit, even with streaming music on the ferry or while hiking.
Just yesterday, I tried to connect to the free Govt Wifi in the Wind Tower Park in Aberdeen's Ap Lei Chau, and despite getting the password from the website for "safe surfing", I was unsuccessful and wasted a few frustrating minutes trying.

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I mean open and unencrypted, of course; if you have to buy something to get the password it's not "free".

And my SIM card is voice and SMS only. The only Internet it gets is from wifi.

I don't need to be online 24/7 so a data plan is a luxury I do without.

I guess once people started trying to watch online TV and Youtube it made giving free wifi a problem.

I'm sure the business owners paying for the service never intended for people wondering through main street to be able to access their wifi for free. They probably just wised up to it and made it password protected so that only themselves and their customers could access it. Fair enough.

Yep. Nowhere to sit unless you pay. No water to drink unless you pay. No wifi unless you pay. Perfectly reasonable and civilised.

Anyway, in HK there is no data cap on broadband, so no matter how many "freeloaders" there are the owner has no extra charge. The problem is as mentioned, people sucking up most of the bandwidth with video. Smarter routers can discriminate on that basis, as in the govt free wifi, but it's not a standard setting.

That happened a long time ago. I hardly remember a time when Lamma business offered free Wifi without password to anybody. But up to 1/3 of private Wifi routers were password-free just a few years ago. You could get free Wifi on Main Street and even in many homes. Almost all protected now.

One additional benefit of 3G/4G, besides streaming music or radio almost anywhere on Lamma, is having a portable Wifi Hotspot at no extra charge, letting you up/download up to 10 times faster than the 3Mbps fastest broadband speed.

But as there's a huge price difference between 3G and 4G data plans, I wonder if it makes any difference to data speeds on Lamma. Even the best 4G connections here rarely exceed 35Mbps. Anybody checked this out? We could save up to several hundred $s per month by using only 3G.

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Or we could pay $250.month for 200 M service if Hutchison would turn on the fucking fibre network they put under our streets two years ago.
But they get a better return selling 4G, so I gave up holding my breath for that.

You could get 3G for below under $100 these days, I think. Still cheaper than any Broadband connection anywhere in town... and it's available now.

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Since I don't get a mobile signal in my home, 3G isn't viable for me.
(Which is why I was trying to get wifi in Main Street, to sign up for Whatsapp you need simultaneous mobile and Internet connections.
At home I have only wifi. In Main Street I have only mobile. Eventually I did it at a friend's house.)

Also they have draconian data caps, which they're not enforcing now but one day they might.
Doesn't matter how fast it is if you hit your download limit after 2 days.

Yeah that Fibre again. Never happening.

We could always start our own Lamma ISP and demand access to that dark, dark fibre or else...

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"Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat!"

I needed wifi urgently when my system was down a couple of days ago, and I sat outside the library, and even though it was closed, there was a good free signal.

Zep, you're welcome anytime to sit outside our house for a free WiFi signal.
If you ask nicely I might even serve you fresh, French-pressed offee and a macaron on our rooftop so you can fully enjoy our WiFi, available for free 24 hours/day!

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Nice to know I have helpful neighbours - I'll immediately cancel my Netvigator account and hang around outside your houses, shouting up for a coffee when I need one.