Gibraltar Wifi access

[cameron45]

Gibraltar Wifi access

Wifi access in Marina Bay is sadly lacking in reliability as well as being the most expensive we have found on our way here from the UK. Any other experiences?

 

[capnsensible]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

We just had 2 years of free in Lanzarote. Here is a total rip off, not happy!!

 

[Grehan]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

If you mean YachtConnect (buy time on scratch cards from Bianca's) I found it worked pretty well for the 18 months I was in Marina Bay. Some days it does drop out - this is because of the Telefonica connection it depends on, not YachtConnect itself - but I found this infrequent. Try a phone call to Jens.
I also didn't think it was that pricey, but I was buying a fair wodge of time at a time, and maybe things have changed.

 

[samwise]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

In the past three years that we have been cruising, we found that the promised "explosion" in marina wifi availability has never happened. When we left Calais for the Med three years ago they said "Next year." Last month we returned, still nothing. We were offered an Internet Cafe choice at five Euros for 15 minutes, which we thought a bit steep. It was a similar deal all the way down. Where it was available you had to be at least line of sight from the Captainerie and not much more than 100 metres away. At Navy Service near Port St Louis, you had to brave the mozzies and balance your laptop on the office steps if you were trying for an after- hours connection. It was free however! The best arrangements were in the bars where you brought a drink or two and logged on. Lagos in Portugal was a good example.
I really think that good wifi access is becoming an essential part of service to cruisers and bearing in mind the prices we are being asked to pay for a marina berth, it should come with the territory or at least be offered at a realistic rate.

 

[BoyBlue49]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

Try The Lord Nelson pub in Casemates, it was free when I was last there in July, access code is something like 123456789

 

[jmac]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

Just pop round under the car park to the steps by sheppards. There were 2 good sites available there!

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Gibraltar Wifi access

I found YachtConnect excellent but expensive, as Grehan said. That was one year ago. I have also used the Spanish Yoigo sim card and was able to get GRPS (albeit a slow connection) in the town.

 

[charles_reed]

Re: European Wi-Fi access

I think people are perhaps being a little naive expecting cheap (never mind free) and easily accessible wi-fi access in ANY european marinas.

During my recent time in Mediterranean France I found about 60% of sites boasted of WiFi, prices ranges from €2-€10 and hour, but at least they were there. I found many bars had Wi-Fi, but tended to charge. Best was SNM Marseille, there it was free and berthing was 60% of the going marina rate.

Italy is almost bereft of WI-Fi, sure you can get a thin ethernet access to the router in many Internet cafés, at the expense of always having to alter DNS gateways, which the attendant frequently didn't know.

I'm writing this on passage Acciaroli-Portorosa, using the TIM network GRPS - 20 hrs for €20, accessible using the Nokia mobile nearly anywhere in this country - in France I was using Bouygues special deal 20Mb for €15. I'm piggybacking on the Lipari cell.

With most European telecoms well down the route of 3G, I think WiFi is redundant, this connection regularly downloads at 10% of good ADSL speeds (by which I mean 8mB which speed most Portals can't achieve) and x10 old-fashioned analogue modems. OK uploads are about 120Kb.

So, I'd suggest, stop trying to chase the chimera of WiFi when cruising, it's usually unobtainable and scarcely ever free.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: European Wi-Fi access

I found that where it was available, Orange WiFi was excellent in France (yes, I do mean WiFi, not part of the Orange phone network). The WiFi was also excellent in Cannes - albeit expensive.

As for Italy the WiFi in Porto Turistico di Roma seemed good when we were there for a couple of weeks (ouch, that was an expensive experience in total /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif). We are now lying alongside the Fiumicino canal and have almost ADSL-speed WiFi free, included in the berthing rate (in itself, well under half the price of PTR). AFAIK there will be only three liveaboards here this winter so I don't think we'll have a problem. As a backup, I have WIND G3/GPRS that only costs €6 per month and can be used anywhere in Italy.

I'm on a course at them moment, in central Rome, and several of the other students say that they are piggy-backing on unlocked WiFi at their digs. I can quite often get my emails on my Palm in the street, around Rome using WiFi.

I predict that in due course marinas will have to offer free WiFi but they will need to issue a logon so that those taking an unfair slice of the bandwidth can be throttled. In the three winters we spent at Almerimar, neither of the two main competing systems worked properly as people, having paid from €30 to €40 per month, expected to leave BBC radio and Classic FM running all day and downloading music and videos (one chap had downloaded over 1000 films). I did try to explain to the group who were complaining about the terrible WiFi that if only they would cut out radio and TV the service would probably stretch. Given that they don't run enough bandwidth into the marina, yet, to give everyone enough bandwidth to do these things they will need to throttle. The analogy is a shared water pipe - fine if everyone just uses the water for domestic purposes but won't go round if everyone leaves their sprinklers on all day.