How to Find the Fastest Free Public Wi-Fi Hotspots
I travel a lot, which means I spend a lot of time working with public Wi-Fi hotspots. After connecting to literally hundreds of points in different cafes, restaurants and hotel bars, I can tell you one universal truth: not all public Wi-Fi is created equal.
Yes, sometimes you connect to a coffee shop with Wi-Fi strong enough to download a few movies for your upcoming flight, but more often than not that “free” Wi-Fi is barely enough to scroll through your email, and downloading a movie will probably take you are four days old.
PC Magazine, in collaboration with Ookla Speedtest, recently examined Wi-Fi speeds across a range of major restaurants, cafes and retail chains to determine where is the best place to stay for free Wi-Fi, and which places looking for Wi-Fi should probably , skip. … You can check out the full results here , but here are a few highlights:
Coffee shops
Dunkin ‘Donuts and Peet’s offer the fastest Wi-Fi in coffee shops, followed by Starbucks. Dunkin ‘offers significantly faster download speeds than others, with an average download speed of 16.6 Mbps. In contrast, you’ll only get 6.4 from Peet’s and 6.3 from Starbucks, so if you need to download some files, Dunkin ‘is the way to go.
The worst networks for Wi-Fi were The Coffee Bean with an average speed of 3.5 Mbps and 2.3 Mbps and Caribou Coffee at 6.6 Mbps and 1.4 Mbps.
Fast food
This one was a little shocking to me. The fastest wifi from the fast food chain was actually at McDonald’s. It ran at 24.2 Mbps down and 6.1 Mbps up. Second place went to Panera Bread, one of my favorite places with Wi-Fi on the road. At the very bottom of the heap was KFC, which only offered an average of 1.4 Mbps down and 0.8 Mbps up, and Shake Shack, which dropped speeds by 1.5 Mbps and 0.7 Mbps up. …
Retail store
I can’t say I ever go to a retail store looking for Wi-Fi, but if you do, your best bet is to go to Microsoft or Apple stores. Microsoft came out on top with an average speed drop of 55.7 Mbps; in second place is Apple with a speed of 41.8 Mbps. Worst retail stores for Wi-Fi include IKEA at 3.3Mbps and Lowe’s, which comes in last at 2.1Mbps.
As with most things, your mileage may vary depending on the location you choose. Wi-Fi in a big city is likely to be slightly better than Wi-Fi in a country where Wi-Fi in general can be a bit problematic. Even between Starbucks locations, you’ll see the difference between locations that have Google Wi-Fi and those that don’t.
That said, if you’re traveling and looking for a place to do a little bit of work, you’ll probably be a little better off picking one of the “fast” winners at the bottom of the list. …