Cornish Pasty Blog

Big correction on Starbucks hotspots in corfu

I need to correct an earlier post of mine.

Regarding Starbucks above the Municipal Gardens and Zoo in Limassol.

When I visited this Starbucks I saw signals from a range of wifi sites but could not connect to one and get a splash screen. Later I posted about a piece I saw in the Cyprus Mail giving wifi hotspots across Cyprus; it said you could access the internet in Starbucks across Cyprus with a card that costs ?7 (Cypriot pounds) for 24 hours.

I failed to pick up on this until I revisited the above mentioned Starbucks today. I asked whille I was there and was told that there was also a card that gave 2 hours connection for ?3 (Cypriot pounds). Once I had the card, which is from Logosnet Technologies and comes sealed in a plastic wallet, I scratched off the back which gave the user password, the username was displayed above it.

There is an explanatory leaflet, in Greek and English, that comes with the card; it sets out what needs to be done to connect to the hotspot e.g. having your browser set to accept "Active Scripting". I connected with my Axim and did not have any way of turning this on.

Initially my browser rejected the connection when I tried to connect to a website, expecting to be taken to a splash screen. I then put in www.forthnet.com as a website to visit and this took me to a splash screen for connecting, (I had already told the Axim to connect to the Forthnet signal that I saw). Because Opera had not suceeded in connecting I went through Internet Explorer but, when I tested it later, Opera could also get the splash screen and accept the login.

Connection strength from where we sat, the pillar nearest to the toilets, was five out of five bars on the Axim Today screen and -50 on it's wifi configuration screen. I walked up to the beverage collection point from my seat and the average signal strength was -50 which is very good for a public hotspot, (I've not seen full strength in the UK). Also, I was able to download a photowalking video by Scoble of Thomas Hawk 48Mb without any sign of throttling, unlike the UK.