Today I went to HiTec which is part of Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong where the famous car exhibition is held. Much to my surprise I have found inside the Mall the FON WiFi Signal! I was able to access e-mail and so on without much difficulties, I enjoyed the experience. For those of you who don’t know, this was the location of the former old airport and is now an exhibition center for special events.

I purchased the Smartone Vodafone Mobile Broadband as it appeared to offer much promise of a truly mobile broadband, excited I started using the service. Check out the data points here.

I purchased umlimited and also understood that I couldn’t torrent or use with an peer-to-peer file sharing arrangement, the terms of service are described here. Ok I get it, don’t abuse the network with a lot of downloads, the network can’t handle it. Fine, I only use it for e-mail and web browsing.

Perhaps the fine print that I should have paid more attention to was this:

SmarTone-Vodafone has the absolute discretion to forthwithlimit your data throughput or amount of your data transferred, or suspend/terminate the Service without notice, upon the occurrence of any one or more of the circumstances specified above.

The service was working fine, I wasn’t getting the promised 3.6Mbps but I was getting good speeds of around 1Mbps, but then I hit 400 megabytes of usage (I have an unlimited plan) and I got the below, 50bps speeds

and this too…4.7 kbps, the service basically became completely useless to me. I could not access the Internet with any reasonable speed, I can browse but I could not send out any e-mails that had attachments that were around the 250K size, nevermind sending out 5 megabyte powerpoints, forget that. Essentially in an attempt to provide all-you-can-eat bandwidth, they have compromised the service quality and are proclaiming that the future is HSDPA? Not like this guys, either the people who developed this system don’t understand that people use the Internet in vastly different ways or they are just hoping that people won’t be using more than 400 Megabytes a month? You have got to be kidding me, in this case I have only sent e-mails, how many e-mails with powerpoints do you receive in a month? How big are those powerpoints, let’s say they are 5 megabytes, that’s 80 powerpoints in a month, or 2.6 powerpoints a day. I don’t know about you, but in any corporate environment I have attachments flying around everywhere.

I am very dissapointed, if you expect me to pay more than HK400 for this service a month you are mistaken, I’ve essentially just paid HK1 per megabyte of real internet usage, and the rest was a paltry dial-up experience, completely unusable as work broadband.

Stay away from this service and pay attention to this:

SmarTone-Vodafone has the absolute discretion to forthwithlimit your data throughput or amount of your data transferred

Let’s hope we get real WiFi everywhere, at least we don’t get rate limited to less than dial-up speeds, at least a modem provides 56k speeds.

All floors have coverage, I was pretty amazed, having lunch, popped out my laptop and voila! There was FON_FreeWifi. IFC is connected to the Hong Kong Airport Express and is Hong Kong’s International Finance Center, lots of restaurants and shops around, very cool.

So I had dinner in Happy Valley on Sing Woo Road and guess what, I saw a FON signal, I promptly logged in, it’s great! I was in a japanese restaurant called Yakitoritei at that time, not sure where the signal came from but it was great to have it, and use it!

Spread the free Wi-Fi!

Congratulations to FON for making it a top 10 startup to watch for. Happy New Year!

Fresh off the heels of the announcement we went to see if FON really works in McDonalds in the busy Central district on Queens Road right at the financial district next to the Bossini, Giordano and of course McDonald shop.

I take out my Wireless Device and……………..

The FON_FreeWiFi signal is shown, very cool, also tested the Signal strength on the street level.

The signal strength is not bad, not fantastic but I still get a Tx Rate of 54 Mbps.

and here is the FON captive portal, I login and it works although there is a bit of weirdness I’m on the Internet browsing! Well done, on the path to WiFi’ing up the City for free!

FON 熱點發佈會: 今天起香港 FON 熱點激增三百!

為了讓大家感受 WiFi Everywhere，
FON 走遍香港九龍新界，甚至離島．．．
務求發掘更多人氣熱點發放更多的 FON WiFi 訊號！

現在除了 McDonalds, Starbucks,
California Red Karaoke 等等連鎖餐廳可以透過 FON WiFi 上網外，
你更會發現 FON_FreeWiFi 隨時出現在你身邊。
身為 Bill 或是 Linus 的你，
記住隨身帶備你的 WiFi 設備，隨時用 FON WiFi 上網！

The signal is there! This is fontastic!

I didn’t realize it, but the new FON Shop looks really neat, check it out over here. English and Chinese version for Hong Kong obviously. It comes out on top of Google!

What is interesting is that the USB WiFi adaptor has been SOLD OUT, why are they not making new ones?

I’ve seen FON in IFC before but never checked it out more as usually I am in a mad rush when I am in there buying stuff or going to a meeting, so today I’m going to write a bit more about it since I had dinner there and as I walked around this popular Mall while it was empty I was actually able to see exactly what was going on there!

The Signal was very strong on the 1st and 2nd Level closest to Mikimoto (famous for pearls) and Prada (famous for really very expensive fashion). So for all the bored boyfriends/husbands who need to wait as their other half does the Shopping, they can download stuff at super high speeds! Yeehaa!

Obviously IFC is a very popular location and I was not surprised to see excellent coverage of all sorts of Wi-Fi signals, I was surprised not to see PCCW but HKBN and CSL were there as well, the other signal I think was random and one was obviousy secure. I didn’t realize CSL was also offering Wi-Fi services.

The most interesting thing was that the Signal held out all the way into the Lane Crawford which is a level above, and is also very popular, so now at least I know that if I need to get my quick download Fix, this is where I go in IFC! I haven’t done more thorough checking but the Signal was best in those areas I thought but I welcome any other FON findings!

Courtesy of Flickr images via blog.fon.com/hk