Downloading over puplic WiFi

[Tranesblues]

I have recently moved to an area in which it is hard or even impossible to get broadband. Therefore the only place I have to do any downloading is at the local coffee shop. What are the issues concerning this? Are there any? How would I go about configuring my client to get good speeds or will it be nearly impossible to do that? Do public places usually block that kind of P2P stuff? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Josh

[kluelos]

It's probably not blocked as such, but possibly forbidden -- you'll get yourself disliked for grabbing that much of their bandwidth, should you get it working that well -- and possibly just banned.

If you're not very careful you'll suck up all their upstream bandwidth, and nobody else will be able to do much of anything. This will not make you popular. If they don't have a rule about it they might make a new one just for you. So be careful as h*** with your global max upload limit and leave them plenty of leftover.

You probably won't be able to get decent download speed because you won't be able to open a listen port through their router's firewall. You can *try* using UPnP on it, but the router may not support it and if whoever set it up knew what they were doing, they'll have disabled it. Or you might get lucky and they've disabled the firewall altogether.

Most such places aren't, for a fact, too well equipped to tell what you're doing, but they are going to notice if every time you show up, their connectivity goes south. Especially if they're also using the connection for their own purposes.