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Public Wi-Fi Tests / Discussion

Hostel I stayed at in Vienna. 💯Mbps symmetrical 😍
Screenshot_20240606_190248_nPerf.webp


Changing trains at Klagenfurt Hauptbahnhof… 🤦🏻‍♂️
Screenshot_20240606_190506_nPerf.webp
 
I've worked at Tesco stores but never ran a speed test on the WiFi before 🤦🏽‍♂️

I end up not using them because they break certain sites (nothing naughty!) and prevent Adguard DNS from working. But I've gone ahead and ran some tests anyway.

Here's the public "Tesco WiFi" which is powered by BT:
5Mbps down, 1Mbps up, 270ms ping


And for comparison, here's the "COLLEAGUE" version:
34Mbps down, 27Mbps up, 12ms ping


At some stores, the Tesco WiFi captive portal will take a good 5 minutes to get through because of how slow the internet is. The Colleague WiFi is no better, only managing to get 1Mbps max in these cases. Ironically, this mostly happens in flagship stores.
 
I've worked at Tesco stores but never ran a speed test on the WiFi before 🤦🏽‍♂️

I end up not using them because they break certain sites (nothing naughty!) and prevent Adguard DNS from working. But I've gone ahead and ran some tests anyway.

Here's the public "Tesco WiFi" which is powered by BT:
View attachment 15065

And for comparison, here's the "COLLEAGUE" version:
View attachment 15066

At some stores, the Tesco WiFi captive portal will take a good 5 minutes to get through because of how slow the internet is. The Colleague WiFi is no better, only managing to get 1Mbps max in these cases. Ironically, this mostly happens in flagship stores.
I get 71Mbps down and 18Mbps upload at my local Tesco, on guest Wi-fi. ISP is BT and I'm assuming it's FTTC.
 
The Angel Hotel (Wetherspoons) Whitby - The Cloud

Browsing felt very slow. With it also being a hotel I'm guessing congestion. Not the usual speeds for Spoons WiFi.
image.webp
 
I'm also very interested in public WiFi speeds and set-ups for similar reasons to you (its fun to see the wildly different networks and speeds: some places have FTTP with hundreds of megabytes per second and WiFi 6 (like Network Rail stations), while others are speed-capped to 1 MBPS (like Stagecoach) or 2 MBPS (Great Northern and Thameslink trains).
I've done several thousand speedtests by this point with the aim of building a whole dataset. I've also written some code to run calculations off all the tests I've done.
I’m planning to post some speedtests here soon as well as a detailed write-up comparing WiFi across motorway services chains in the UK (I've visited enough to spot a pattern).
Being blind screenshots are quite hard for me to manage as I need to put each one through an image-to-text conversion, so text data would be much easier for me. If anyone has a Speedtest.net/SpeedSmart history CSV with lots of WiFi networks I would love to see it (feel free to remove any networks you don't want shared). I'll of course only add to my dataset with permission as well.
P.S. I experience the same issue at Premier Inn's as well where like in the car park I get 3 bard 4G and 1 bar 3G in a room 10 metres away.
 
Tesco Extra Abingdon - BT
image.webp

There's an O2 Boostbox in this store but it looks ancient. VF keeps a usable B20 or B8 signal in the store from a nearby macro, would expect O2 to be similar. EE and Three are non-existent.
 
View attachment 15776Premier Inn "Ultimate" Wi-Fi in Nottingham City Center Chapel Bar hotel. It feels like they also block your phone signal too so you can't use that
Thats a disgrace for a service called "ultimate" I'm currently in a Premier Inn using my own Huawei 5G router. I refuse to pay for "ultimate" and the standard service is 1Mbps / 0.5Mbps.

There's no excuse for this in 2024. I'll be leaving a comment in my Tripadv isor and Google reviews.
 
Thats a disgrace for a service called "ultimate" I'm currently in a Premier Inn using my own Huawei 5G router. I refuse to pay for "ultimate" and the standard service is 1Mbps / 0.5Mbps.

There's no excuse for this in 2024. I'll be leaving a comment in my Tripadv isor and Google reviews.
Wi-Fi aside the whole hotel wasn't great tbh. Splurged a bit more for a "Premier Plus" room and there was holes in the wall, air con kept disabling itself (new? touch control panel that reception can disable/enable) and I had to walk down to reception for them to manually turn it back on about 15 times through out the time I was there as it was so warm in the room if it was switched off due to the sealed up windows. I thought Premier Inn was meant to be good but it changed my mind on them a bit.
 
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