I am slowly adding more locations now. This is intended to be a crowdsourced map. Everyone is welcome to add more locations and provide comments/votes here.
Free people from going to a cafe for work only to leave because there's no wifi, restroom, or outlet!!
In Sweden you'd just sit down and use your phone as a proxy. It is usually much faster, and also much safer.
I live in a smaller town. Maybe the crowdiness of Manhattan is the issue?
I use my phone in coffee shops that don't have [acceptable] WiFi. The main drawback is needing to be mindful of phone battery in addition to the laptop battery.
That being said, it's a great resource when you need a space to work at 11am-2pm (when all of the WiFi-offering spots are filled). There are a couple of local coffee shops with no WiFi, that don't forbid laptops – they're usually empty during peak hours.
One would hope such silliness should be illegal.
I just googled it and see that Verizon in the US was successfully sued for blocking tethering .. one would hope that more people take action against companies attempting this.
Using fast.com (Netflix server) I get 56 Mbps down and 24 Mbps up on Verizon with my iPhone 15 Pro Max in Manhattan which is another reason to use WiFi.
To me it's weird and so much friction to try figure out wifi Hotspot and password and login. Makes me feel like a homeless poor person, as if I can't pay for my own mobile data.
If you're not noticing a drain on your battery from keeping your hotspot on its because no one is connected to it / using it.
What I find more surprising is that Sweden dropped “unlimited” data plans, I’m not aware of any data plan that is unlimited now. So if you want to do some video calls then I would be looking for wifi.
But yes that is exactly the thing. Except for the security risks it is just not worth the hassle to go through a captive portal sign-on just to find out that the WiFi is so much worse than using your phone.
https://www.link.nyc
I'm sure governments like the idea of not having to build-out public bathroom infrastructure (which gets a lot harder in places that freeze).
I noticed in Denver a number of places that had gone out of their way to remove seating specifically to avoid having to offer restrooms to the booming homeless population in the urban center there.
I still like the concept. But it feels tough to compete with Google Maps in the geo-information / review space. If Google Maps just added a more robust reviewing feature (eg. wifi speed) and metadata (outlets), then there wouldn't be a need for our projects.
Also individually there is inherently no incentive to share some gem of a coffee shop you found with limited seating capacity to strangers on the internet. I had some ideas to work around that, but it's something that really needs to be addressed. It's amazing anyone even bothers to write reviews for any sites (except as a favor to a nice person, or out of revenge for terrible service) given that none of the platforms really incentivize it, which is a shame. As much flack as social media sites get, I do believe there is space for it in this domain - which I guess Google Maps is sort of starting to adopt but Google is just horrendously terrible at trying to do anything in the social media space or UI/UX-related (eg. like a bunch of CS nerds trying to create a women's fashion blog).
But, don't fret. This is precisely why I made https://mapcomplete.org, where you can create niche maps based on OpenStreetMap. This jumpstarts general information but has the possibility to add very niche questions. The added bonus is that, when you add e.g. a cafe, it'll be available in all other maps as well.
For this topic, I've added a filter to filter on 'has internet access'. I also added the question if a cafe offers electricity, but those haven't been marked in NYC yet; so here is a map with all cafes offering internet access: https://mapcomplete.org/cafes_and_pubs.html?z=9.8&lat=40.697...
Browsing can be done without an account, contributing requires an OSM-account.