 |
Accessing Wi-Fi from “Cóc” Coffee Shops. |
There’s no need to go to upscale Wi-Fi cafes; many young people can still bring their laptops and access wireless Internet from the sidewalks around “Cóc” coffee shops right in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City.
The first stop is a small café in an alley across from Zenta Coffee on Mac Dinh Chi Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. As soon as he orders a drink, my friend quickly pulls out a second-hand laptop worth over $500 from his backpack.
With just a few keystrokes, he manages to detect the signal to connect to Zenta’s wireless network. On the screen, various parameters like signal strength, quality, and transmission speed appear, and with a simple click, he comfortably checks his email, chats with friends, and browses the news. He explains: “It’s nothing unusual; I’m just ‘borrowing’ the Wi-Fi signal from Zenta. Since the Wi-Fi signal can extend about 100 meters outside the café’s space, I ‘take advantage’ of this to connect from outside, as long as I stay within that range, it works just fine.”
He also revealed that this “discovery” came from a friend who is a reporter, who accidentally accessed the Wi-Fi from the sidewalk next to a fancy coffee shop.
Although the signal strength is only about 20-33% and the quality is somewhat “flickering,” according to my friend, that’s more than “okay.” After an hour connecting to the world, he spent just under 10,000 VND for a coffee and a bottle of fresh orange juice, considerably cheaper than the cost of being “trendy” in a high-end Wi-Fi café.
At the bustling coffee street surrounding Turtle Lake, at the corner of International Square, as soon as he opened his laptop, there were not one, but three Wi-Fi signals from nearby cafés and shops. There were Window1, Windy, and FPT Nokia with speeds ranging from 5-11 Mbps, providing plenty of choices.
Trying to connect to Window1, as soon as he clicked, the homepage of an online newspaper appeared. After some successful trials, he switched to Windy’s network to reply to emails and search for information on Google.
“Just think, if there’s an urgent matter that requires emailing a client or a friend and it’s not convenient to go into a Wi-Fi café, you can simply pull up at Turtle Lake, open your laptop. With so many overlapping Wi-Fi signals here, you can ‘borrow’ from any café, and that solves the problem!” – he chuckled.
However, there are times when the effort to “borrow” a signal fails, especially when trying to access the FPT Nokia network at Turtle Lake or some networks like NETGEAR and fps-hcm-wl near Ho Xuan Huong coffee street. These are private wireless networks of companies, and when attempting to connect, visitors must enter a password. Of course, this is a necessary safety measure to protect the company’s data.
