Wififi Argentina

December 1, 2011 9:21 AM

Wififi: Trying to get sponsors to give us loads of money via skype calls. But...where can we get GOOD, RELIABLE wifi connection in Buenos Aires, Argentina? If a café, the cheaper the better...
posted by omnigut to travel & transportation around Buenos Aires, Argentina (10 answers total)

Quiet is also important...like, a cafe with nooks and crannies or a library with a quiet corner. Those kinds of things. Thanks!
posted by omnigut at 9:42 AM on December 1, 2011

This is pretty much Urban Station's business model.
posted by jeb at 9:45 AM on December 1, 2011

[Link to project removed. Feel free to list it in your profile.]
posted by cortex at 9:49 AM on December 1, 2011

Hi, internet is kinda slow here, and rummaging around their site I can't find their rates. Their site looks so flashy I'm assuming it's expensive?
posted by omnigut at 10:00 AM on December 1, 2011

Okay, Urban Station says it's 19 pesos for the first hour, 17 for the second, but the coffee is free. That would make it cheap for us if we drank a lot of coffee.

Are there (quiet) places our there where you pay for the coffee but the (reliable, fast) wifi is free?
posted by omnigut at 10:12 AM on December 1, 2011

Most public wifi in coffee or food places in Buenos Aires (generally in all Argentina) plain sucks, it's more of a tourist trap than anything else the way it's set up. Yes, in most cases you will get a connection, but in my experience it breaks off often, has unpredictable speeds (when it doesn't just crawl along), and the personnel has no clue about how to fix things if the wifi stops working. Perhaps some mefite over Bs As or who has recently wandered through the city has found a golden spot, I'd be interested to know for next time I myself travel there, heh. Honestly, even when it's a bit expensive for our incomes, I'd probably go to this Urban Station place and save myself the grief next time, I didn't know this existed.
posted by Iosephus at 10:29 AM on December 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Damn.
posted by omnigut at 10:37 AM on December 1, 2011

When I was in Argentina, I often used skype in those internet cafes where you pay a few pesos an hour to use one of their computers. Maybe look for a quieter one of those? The connection is probably going to be better than wifi, and the computers always already had Skype.
posted by Metasyntactic at 11:16 AM on December 1, 2011

Right, the "locutorios" with internet access usually have a decent speed unless they are crammed at the time. On the other hand, their machines are very often swimming in viruses and trojans, so your accounts can easily be compromised if you use one of those places. I've lost count of the number of times I had to disinfect a flash drive after downloading some media content (don't bother with executables) in a locutorio for later offline use. Depending on your needs, you might find the old hardware and matching years-old software a problem too, some of those places look exactly the same today as when I used them three years ago, down to the version of Firefox and all. Sometimes using a flash drive with portable apps might help, but running privileges might be blocked.
posted by Iosephus at 11:28 AM on December 1, 2011

Yeah, only skype needed, really
posted by omnigut at 11:48 AM on December 1, 2011