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Accessing Wi-Fi from a “cóc” coffee shop. |
There’s no need to visit an upscale Wi-Fi coffee shop; many young people can simply grab their laptops and connect to wireless Internet from the sidewalks around the “cóc” coffee shops right in the heart of Ho Chi Minh City.
The first stop is a coffee shop located in a small alley opposite the Zenta coffee shop on Mac Dinh Chi Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. After ordering a drink, my friend quickly pulled out a second-hand laptop worth over $500 from his bag.
With just a few keystrokes, he managed to detect the signal to access Zenta’s wireless network. The screen displayed various metrics such as signal strength, quality, and transfer speed, and with a simple click of the mouse, he comfortably checked his email, chatted with friends, and browsed news websites. He explained, “It’s nothing unusual; I’m just ‘borrowing’ Zenta’s Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi signal can extend about 100 meters outside the café, so I’m ‘taking advantage’ of it to connect from outside, as long as I stay within that distance, it’s fine.“
He also mentioned that this “discovery” was shared by a journalist friend who had accidentally accessed the Wi-Fi from the sidewalk next to a fancy coffee shop.
Although the signal strength was only around 20-33% and the quality was somewhat “unstable,” according to him, it was still quite “okay.” After an hour of connecting to the world, he spent just under 10,000 VND on a coffee and a bottle of fresh orange juice, which is significantly 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, he found not one but three Wi-Fi signals from nearby coffee shops and stores. There were Window1, Windy, and FPT Nokia with speeds ranging from 5-11 Mbps, providing plenty of options to choose from.
After trying to connect to Window1, with a click of the mouse, the homepage of an online newspaper popped up instantly. After some successful trials, he switched to Windy to reply to emails and search for information on Google.
“Just think, if there’s something urgent and I need to email a client or a friend but can’t get into a Wi-Fi café, I can just stop at Turtle Lake, open my laptop. With so many overlapping Wi-Fi signals here, I can connect to any café’s signal, and that solves the problem!” he joked.
However, there are times when the effort to “borrow” a signal fails when trying to “infiltrate” the FPT Nokia network at Turtle Lake or other networks like NETGEAR and fps-hcm-wl near Ho Xuan Huong coffee street. Since these are internal wireless networks of companies, accessing them requires visitors to enter a password. Of course, this is a necessary security measure to protect company data.
