Cornish Pasty Blog

wifi at Starbucks Taunton and Little Chef Chiverton Cross

Starbucks
I parked in the 5 storey carpark above the library and shopping centre in town, Starbucks is on Fore Street (part of the centre that is on the street), so no problems finding it.

I know generally that Starbucks has wifi but did not know there was one as close to home, (hah! 3.5 hours' drive away), until I used the Cloud's search option, the night before my trip, to pin down the various hotspots available in the town.

The provider was T-Mobile and all I had to do to make the connection was choose the roaming partner I was with and enter my login details.

I managed to find a comfy chair tucked out of the way and free as a family occupied the other two plus floorspace for their child. I got comfortable and, as mentioned in my briefest post before this one, got connected with only the slightest of hiccups.
Bandwidth was reasonable, ie not as fast as home but I do have hotspotvpn switched on. I did not notice anyone else using the facility so I guess I had the best of the speed. Connection strength was good on this Dell Axim x51v.

Little Chef
Sits on a roundabout on the A30 at a junction with the St.Agnes, Newquay, Bodmin and Truro roads.

The supplier is The Cloud and I had a choice of clicking on the symbol for my service provider or choosing from a pull down list. Connection was smooth and would have been quick, but for a couple of false starts when my browser (Opera) insisted on resetting itself. Signal strength was the full five bars and again I seemed to be the only one using the bandwidth; there was a small degredation in speed but less so than Starbucks, maybe someone was using it there - there were 25 or so people whereas here there are 8.

I have not pulled up stats from my connections manager for now as I want to be heading home soon and have finished my food. It has been a long day today, up at 5am and while tomorrow is a later start it will still need to be by 6am. It is 7.15 now and time I sent this from diarist and got on my way; another 30 minutes drive till home and packing my bag for tomorrow.