In this case, Tino of all people is the loser: for he has once again been suckered into coming into Panera only to find that the network is kaput. The network here is now well and truly down more than it’s up, at least when I’m here. It’s even more kaput than usual today, too. Usually, the problem is that their captive portal authentication thing doesn’t work. Today, there’s no network at all:

I note that the Hyatt — the Reston Panera is in the lobby of the Hyatt — somehow manages to keep their network running: but then they charge $10 a day for it, so they have an incentive to keep it running.

Panera has an incentive, too: I wouldn’t come here without the network (particularly since my phone doesn’t work at all in here). It’s just a less-obvious incentive.

The place is entirely empty, in any case, and some of that is probably due to the fact that the network isn’t there. It’ll be even emptier in the future: I’ll be here less often, since the ‘free’ network access is far too costly in terms of uncertainty.

I was at Panera again recently, and I ran the test again. Some of the sites that were blocked when I did my original test in January are now unblocked.

Specifically, Daily Pundit, formerly blocked for ‘weapons’, is now accessible, as are Forvideo and Kalyr.com. Gut Rumbles and Jane’s Net Sex Guide are also, inexplicably, both now okay.

However, some new sites have been added in the last couple of months. I used the same list both in January and this weekend, so these are websites that were positively not blocked then, but are now:

http://imao.us/

Anti-idiotarian rantblog, ranked 37th in the Blogosphere Ecosystem.

http://www.abionline.org/

The American Beverage Institute. This is a website that advocates abstention from drinking and driving. BANNED! by Panera. The WCTU website is also streng verboten at Panera: a theme is developing.

http://www.catotheyoungest.com/

At the moment it’s just showing an Ensim login page (and has been since at least Friday morning, according to the Google cache). Forbidden nevertheless. You can see here the Blogspot incarnation of this warblog.

http://www.chriscmooney.com/

Chris C. Mooney is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. (his bio page says), and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect magazine. There doesn’t appear to be anything objectionable about his website.

http://www.coolpick.com/

A cool-site-of-the-day kind of thing. The only justification for blocking this would be that it’s a tired concept.

http://www.retrospice.com/

Another site experiencing technical difficulties. Right now from home, I see a bare directory index showing no content The Google cache indicates that it was this way at least as early as 9:00 a.m. yesterday, though, so it’s blocked even though there’s no there there. When there was a there, there were ‘hot babes of yesteryear’ there, so maybe blocking it at least makes a little bit of sense — but remember, it wasn’t blocked in January.

http://www2.thelinuxshow.com/

I’m not sure how this ‘www2′ address got into the list; there’s nothing here but an Apache test page. Nevertheless, it was available to Panera customers in January but isn’t today. At http://www.thelinuxshow.com/ we can see that this is the home of the ‘oldest, longest running and without question most listened to webcast focused on Open Technology in the known universe’.

Unfortunately, I did not record why these sites were blocked. To be honest, I forgot the test script was running, and I didn’t check the results before I left. I will be modifying the tests to automatically record this in the future.

I got the list of URLs to try by loading in the contents of my own RSS aggregator, as well as the blogrolls from instapundit.com, dailykos.com, and atrios.blogspot.com.

There seems to be a slight anti-conservative bias in the list, but this could be due to nothing more than the fact that Glenn Reynolds — widely considered ‘conservative’ — has approximately one zillion sites on his blogroll, and that the filter blocks websites related to ‘weapons’. Certainly there are also a bunch of lefty sites that are also blocked for no real discernable reason.

For each site that seems to be improperly blocked, I’ve stuck in a short quote that should serve to illustrate what the site is like.

Many of the sites branded as “adult/mature content” — as Tinotopia once was – probably got that way by using four-letter words once in a while. The question then is: why is Panera protecting its customers from this? I can understand them not wanting people looking at farmsluts.com in there, as it might put other customers off their feed. But political weblogs? I think the problem is that the main market for the nanny filter consists of schools: and so when you use the network at Panera, you are assumed to have the intellect and sensitivities of a child.

http://charlesmurtaugh.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “But getting back to Verghese’s larger point, I’m filing his article away in the corner of my brain (my mind?) devoted to the lonely fight in favor of de facto dualism. Yes, yes, I know that the brain is the seat of the mind, I remain committed to scientific materialism, but I’ve never been completely comfortable with the idea that the mind and body are of the same substance. The problem is in the term “substance,” of course, since again I am obliged to concede that the molecules of the brain are not different from those of the body.”

http://doctor-horsefeathers.com/: Pornography

Quote: “When Galileo, using the scientific method of observation, argued in favor of the heliocentric theory, Church scholars indignantly demanded he recant. A leader among them was Cardinal Bellarmin. “…He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin’s stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth. Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that “his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation.” Father Lecazre declared “it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation.” Others declared, “It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?” Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church…”

http://hereticalideas.com/: Pornography

Quote: “Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
– Ambrose Bierce”

http://seanbaby.com/: Pornography

Probably justified

http://tres_producers.blogspot.com/: Pornography

This site is essentially defunct since 2002, but it formerly offered ‘ Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.’ Or, among other things, pornographers.

http://www.coldfury.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Of course, he was a bit of a fool for saying as much as he did. It is never safe to speak truth to power, as Thomas à Becket and Thomas More found out (not to mention a host of others not named Thomas). Those who assert otherwise speak truth only accidentally, and then not to powers of the like of the English Henrys, let alone worse tyrants; they yammer only at those who feel constrained by the laws of God and/or man. Summers forgot, or did not know this, and he suffers and, in all probability, will continue to suffer for it.

http://www.cyberessays.com/: Illegal Skills/Questionable Skills

Cyber Essays offers ‘free, high-quality term papers, essays, and reports on all subjects’. Not exactly legitimate, but I don’t understand what’s Panera’s interest in blocking something like this.

http://www.dailypundit.com/: Weapons

Except for a link — admittedly at the top of the front page — to a place selling ‘dirt cheap ammo’, there doesn’t seem to be anything there about weapons. So, I suppose the lesson is: if you don’t want to be blocked by SonicWALL, don’t even accept advertising for certain perfectly legal products.

http://www.dailytopless.com/: Adult/Mature Content

The name is an accurate description of the photos to be found here. It is a bit of a mystery why so many sites are labelled ‘pornography’, while this one is merely ‘adult/mature’.

http://www.darkperfection.com/: Pornography

“The fetish scene exposed” — okay, it’s porn.

http://www.fark.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Fark is ‘mature’? I suppose that’s accurate, if only in the euphemistic sense of ‘mature’ meaning ‘immature’.

http://www.forvideo.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Run by the Video Software Dealers’ Association, a trade group for video sales and rental companies. The site is totally innocuous, and there’s no reason to believe it’s ever been anything but.

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/: Adult/Mature Content

I suppose this is ‘mature’ content, as the site consists mainly of people complaining about their employers and their investments.

http://www.gutrumbles.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Probably accurate. This is an occasionally entertaining site run by an incredibly profane bigoted cracker.

http://www.highclearing.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “Life Imitates Art – In Jorge Luis Borges’ classic story, “Tlöaut;n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the contents of a century-old fiction start replacing those of our reality.”

http://www.ismckenzie.com/: Pornography

Utterly baffling. The site is about personal productivity, customer service, and the subtle spirituality of some guy in Edmonton.

http://www.janesguide.com/: Pornography

Fully Jane’s Net Sex Guide.

http://www.jscript.dk/: Adult/Mature Content

The site is about computer security.

http://www.kalyr.com/: Weapons

“This is a site devoted to some of my diverse interests, from RPGs to trains to 1970s dinosaur rock bands. It started off as a means of teaching myself HTML, but then sort of growed, much like any computer project is likely to do.”

http://www.kimdutoit.com/: Weapons

There’s definitely a lot of ‘weapons’ here. The question is: why is it so important to prevent anyone getting at information about ‘weapons’?

http://www.oraculations.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “Buy stock? Oh no! A powerful person (or people)simply takes 10% of the stock and agrees to pay for the stock when the accrued dividends match the stock price at time of “purchase”; in addition he gets a seat on the board of directors PLUS a salary. In exchange, the business won’t have tariff problems, labor problems, or any problems. Judges take money from both sides and routinely rule in favor of the biggest bribe (he keeps both bribes); hospitals have two sections, one for the people who have paid a bribe and one for those who have not.” Adult content, ladies and gentlemen.

http://www.punchbaby.com/: Adult/Mature Content

There’s a link to a video of a wet-T-shirt contest on the front page, so the rating is probably accurate.

http://www.scalzi.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote from the about page: “At the moment (November 2004), I primarily write books: by the end of 2004 I will have five books in the stores. These books are The Rough Guide to Money Online (2000), The Rough Guide to the Universe (2003), Book of the Dumb (2003), Book of the Dumb 2 (2004) and my first published novel, Old Man’s War (2005 release date, but out late 2004). In addition to these books, I have three books currently in the pipeline: The Rough Guide to Science Fiction Film (mid-2005), The Ghost Brigades, which is a sequel to Old Man’s War (late 2005/early 2006), and another novel, The Android’s Dream (late 2006/early 2007).”

http://www.thebitchgirls.us/: Nudism

I’m not sure what exactly is the difference between ‘nudism’ and ‘nudity’. Practitioners of what is called ‘nudism’ usually prefer ‘naturism’, I believe. There no evidence that the Bitch Girls are practitioners of either, and in any case I could find no pictures (of anything) on the website. They are pro-gun, though, with an NRA News banner on their front page.

http://www.wctu.org/: Sex Education

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is too racy for Panera. You read it here first. I cannot find anything on the site about sex education.

http://www.yuppiesofzion.com/: Adult/Mature Content

From their FAQ: “We support Israel not on religious grounds, but on democratic and humanistic ones.” I looked for hard-core pictures of Golda Meir, thinking that this must justify the rating, but I could find nothing.

http://zonitics.blogspot.com/: Pornography

Pornography: “The partisans over at Democratic Underground believe that a massive conspiracy involving untold hundreds of computer programmers and operators is the real reason that President Bush won reelection. Their proof? Exit polls in computer voting states show a wider divergence than those in non-computer voting states. Or do they?”

http://webcamserver-1.pns.anl.gov/view/indexFrame.shtml: Pornography

Argonne National Laboratory, Department of Energy, United States Government. Pornography. Probably they just block anything at all with ‘webcam’ in the URL. The video won’t load for me, so I’m not sure what the camera is pointing at. Somehow I doubt that it’s government-funded Atomic Porn, though.

http://www.anomalies.net: Cult/Occult

“Over 7 GB of UFO, Time-Space, Paranormal, and Conspiracy information.” I sure am glad that Panera is protecting me against this.

http://www.leanleft.com/: Adult/Mature Content

“This inauguration is aristocratic in its arrogance and its sense of entitlement. It is undiplomatic. It is lacking in character. It is small-minded. It is, in the end, un-Christian.” Mature content indeed.

http://www.sadlyno.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote-heavy left-wing blog. They use a lot of quasi-foul language, but so do a lot of things that Panera lets through.

http://throwingthings.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “Given that he’s hosting “SNL” tonight and is all-but-certain to get a Best Actor Oscar nomination Tuesday morning for “Sideways,” it seems like today is a good day to look back at the career of Paul Giamatti.”

http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “There is a certain type of man who absolutely refuses to wear hats, gloves or scarves. Under duress, he may grudgingly wear a baseball cap – something designed to shade your eyes, not keep your head warm. (Hello? Why do they call ballplayers boys of summer?)”

http://blog.browndemocrats.org/: Pornography

Brown University Democrats. Founded by John F. Kennedy, Jr., and now, apparently pronographers. Quote that’s sure to get you hot: “In reaction to the President’s inaugural speech, I just want to echo the chorus of hold him to it. There’s nothing wrong with what he said–liberty, God, freedom, and all. The problem is, his record does not match it.”

http://pansypoos-personal-rant-page.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “friday night, i finally finished the 1903 F encyclopedia. for awhile i asked myself, A or Z, forward or back. and well, i gotta start at what people say is the beginning. and there are 3 volumns of just A. i just hope i can read them before i die.” If there were a ban category for bad spelling and punctuation, I could see that. But ‘mature’, no.

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “Lincoln’s Second Inaugural rose to poetry because its vision was poetic. It was not made so by meter and rhetorical flourishes; those followed naturally upon the ideas. To engineer grand phrases in the service of public relations, as was done for yesterday’s address, is not poetry. It is not even prose. It is propaganda writ large and in a florid hand, with an eye toward talking points and polling data, to move the speechwriters and columnists whose job is to make much of it.” What exactly does adult/mature content mean, anyway? Anything except Barney and Spongebob and so forth could be said to be ‘adult’.

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/: Pornography

This one might actually legitimately qualify for the ‘adult/mature’ tag, as it seems to be the ranting of a bitter man with a foul mouth. It doesn’t seem to be pornographic at all, though.

http://suckful.net: Adult/Mature Content

The large slogan at the top of the main page says ‘fuck you, I’m a pirate’, so maybe the tag is correct.

http://www.thetalkingdog.com/: Adult/Mature Content

The left-wing sites seem a lot more foul-mouthed than most of the right-wing ones, but this left-wing blog goes out of its way to remain clean: “Time marches on. Here’s the thing (for those wondering just how I was going to make this about Bush): this is not atypical. Vaunted gains in American logevity have been a tad… illusory (we remain a dismal 42nd or something in world health measures such as longevity and infant mortality and so forth). Hence, the main reason that “social security is in crisis”– the explosion in the ranks of the superannuated– is a complete and total f***ing lie.” Asterisks in original.

http://www.uppity-negro.com/: Adult/Mature Content

The ‘uppity negro’ of the title, as it happens, died in September 2004, and there’s been little posted to the site since then. Before, it was mainly left-wing political rants. Are politics ‘mature’? I thought kids — at least kids old enough to be using their laptops at Panera — were supposed to be little citizens-in-training.

http://agendabender.blogspot.com: Adult/Mature Content

Quote: “A reader’s comment to this provocative critique of the character rendering in The Polar Express led me to a fascinating piece from the LA Weekly on the science and alchemy of digitizing 35 mm film prints.”

http://www.nakedwriting.com: Pornography

There’s a fairly tame picture of two men kissing on the front page right now — you have to scroll down — but I think it’s the word ‘naked’ that got it banned. Strange that it’s considered ‘pornography’, though, as this guy does appear to actually be a ‘naturist’, and there is a ‘nudism’ category.

http://demosthenes.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Adult, mature quote: “Whether you believe that gay marriage or the War on Terror (or both) motivated the 51%, it’s clear enough that this nonsense wasn’t what they were voting for. Nor is it necessary, as many, many people have been pointing out on the Social Security issue. We’re just seeing the beginning of the process of the demolition of the New Deal taking place. This is happening just in time for record interest rates to brutalize a population of increasingly overextended debtors, just as soon as the shoe drops on the U.S. dollar.” Lock up the kids! By this reckoning, Meet The Press should be rated NC-17.

http://www.blah3.com/graymatter/: Adult/Mature Content

Maybe The Weather Channel should be scrambled, too. Quote: “Yeah, we’re stitting here waiting for 18 to 24 inches of snow to get dumped all over us. I know some of you in other parts of the world don’t consider that much snow, but you gotta understand – if an inch of snow falls on Long Island, most of the citizenry goes into dopey bastard mode and forgets how to drive – but every single one of them simply must drive out to the store for milk, bread and eggs.”

http://thepoorman.net/: Adult/Mature Content

Just another left-wing rantblog. You know, Panera sells The New York Times and the Washington Post in plain sight, without anything covering up all the adult content on their front pages. Tsk tsk.

http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/: Adult/Mature Content

Another left-wing rantblog — this section of the list is from one of the lefty blogrolls. I wonder what they do to you if you try to read The Nation in plain sight at Panera? “Come on, buddy: move along. Go take your spank-mag elsewhere.”

They’re also blocking Cory Doctorow, for reasons that are an utter mystery to me.

As I was saying, I was sitting there trying to make use of the network at a blazing 100 kpbs or so — did I mention that the network was also slow? — when in my distraction the over-loud piped-in music caught my attention, and held on. It was bad, noodley jazz without any real genius or even feeling behind it.

I could not help thinking of how this stuff must be produced: I imagine that someone, somewhere, locks a bunch of musicians in a room with horns (it’s heavy on horns, the better to cut through the Panera background noise) and dope, turns on a tape recorder, and goes away for a few days. When the someone comes back he duplicates the tape and sends it off to people who need jazz in bulk. It’s sold by the yard.

We used to joke that Dressel’s Pub, in St. Louis, always played the World’s Longest Jazz Album, because it never ended and it seemed, at least, to never repeat: but at least that peculiar album contains recognizable and good music.

Anyway, I present for your listening enjoyment two snatches of jazz by the ton, as recorded last night at Panera. You can download the file here, or listen to it in the embedded Quicktime thingy that will appear below if your computer supports Quicktime. It’s kind of quiet, and there’s a lot of background noise, but this is how Bulk Jazz is meant to be, er, enjoyed.

Tinotopia isn’t meant for children, and I try to keep the fart jokes to a minimum. In that, I suppose that the content here is relatively ‘adult’ and ‘mature’. I believe that the block-list people are using those terms as euphemisms for pornography, though. (Or maybe not; they also have a ‘pornography’ category!)

So you might say that, in some senses of the terms, Tinotopia is an ‘adult’ and ‘mature’ site, even though there are no skin pics here. It’s certainly a ’society and lifestyle’ website, as the whole point of it is to allow you, the reader, to experience a bit of the Tino lifestyle, and to imagine what it might be for you to live in such high society yourself.

But Usenet newsgroups is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.

Anyway, earlier this week I set up a proxy server on tinotopia.com that I figured would allow me to do whatever I wanted, independent of the block list — the Sonicwall blocker only acts on http traffic, so you can still get to other things on Tinotopia. I figured out all of Panera’s networks (they have a whole raft of /29s) and told that proxy to accept connections from them, and tested the lot from home.

Today when I got here — I’m at Panera as I write this — I tried things out, and was astonished to see that, despite the fact that my requests were indeed going through the proxy (I was watching the proxy activity log), I was still being blocked! The Panera firewall was actually looking at what was being transferred and not just at the host it was being transferred from!

I quickly established an SSH tunnel back to Tinotopia and started encrypting the traffic — something I suppose I should be doing on a public wireless network anyway — and it all started working.

But what do you call a public wireless network that’s not particularly useful? A coldspot perhaps, though Sears might sue. Last night Nicole and I were hanging out in the Reston Town Center Panera again, and at first we couldn’t get a connection at all, again. The wireless network was there, but the authentication server wasn’t, so nothing could happen.

After a short while, the wireless network went away all together and then came back, and the authentication server was back in the land of the living: someone had rebooted the access point, solving the problem. Score one for Panera.

But our enthusiasm — or my enthusiasm, anyway — soon waned:

That’s right, Tinotopia was unreachable from that network. To say that this limits the usefulness of the network for me is something of an understatement. Note also that there’s no way to lodge a complaint about this, no ‘I think you must be mistaken’ button. And there doesn’t appear to be any place on Sonicwall’s own corporate website to complain, either. They’re just not interested.

Strictly speaking, I suppose they’re accurate. Tinotopia is meant for adults, if only because most children are not interested in urban planning, Chinese ‘markets’, and what Tino thinks of various hotels. (Honestly, it’s a bit amazing that anyone is interested, but there you are.) I discuss ‘mature’ topics here if ‘mature’ is the opposite of ‘juvenile’. It’s just that I can’t see how this should be a ‘Forbidden Category’. I tried to figure out what might have tripped their sensors, as it were, but the Sonicwall website doesn’t list a category called “Adult/Mature Content”. Just Violence/Profanity, Partial Nudity, Full Nudity, Sexual Acts, Gross Depictions, Intolerance, Satanic/Cult, Drugs/Drug Culture, Militant/Extremist, Sex Education, Questionable/Illegal Gambling, and Alcohol & Tobacco. All the sites that I found blocked, though, were because of “Adult/Mature Content” or “Pornography”. ‘Pornography’ I can figure out on my own. Of course none of the sites I was trying to visit were actually pornographic in any sense of the word; the only thing close was Fark, which, among other things, offers links to other sites that might be thought of a pornographic.

Anyway, Tinotopia being blocked was the big problem. I have a proxy server set up to get around problems like this, but guess where it is? I’ll have to re-jigger the system to encrypt my proxy traffic. I would have done this last night while I was sitting there, but — you guessed it — a good number of websites with information having to do with proxy server configuration are also considered ‘pornographic’ etc. so I couldn’t get at a lot of documentation.

Panera is a private company, and of course they’re free to offer whatever kind of wireless network service they like. Most places take the option of not providing any wireless network service at all, so I suppose that Panera is still doing better than average. But then providing no wireless network doesn’t cost anything; Panera’s approach both costs them money and, if these filters don’t improve, don’t really offer their customers all that much utility. I can work around this with minimal trouble, but most people can’t. Panera’s free network is a significant competitive advantage in attracting the kind of people who would use it. But once someone runs up against a blocked website, it’s going to plant a seed of doubt in his mind for the future about the potential usefulness of the network. I’m sure that only a tiny fraction of things are actually blocked, but because a few things that I wanted to read happen to be from that tiny fraction, to me the network appears to have huge holes in it. I don’t think of Panera as offering free wireless Internet service any more; I think of them as offering a shiny toy that can be used by some people for some things.

As it happens, earlier this month I ran into this very problem at Panera Bread in Webster Groves, MO — scant miles from Panera HQ in beautiful Richmond Heights.

I was going through my regular list of weblogs (which I read via the excellent NetNewsWire), and all of a sudden I was confronted with a page telling me that something I was trying to read was pornography. The site? Tightly Wound, a weblog about education. The current top entry is titled ‘I wanna work for the History Channel.’ Porn, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know whether it’s the title (certainly anything ‘tight’ on INTARNET must be porn! say the censors) or the ‘woman’ in the domain name that pulled the trigger. (The ‘big arm woman’ is so because of ‘judicious overuse of the hammer of Righteous Smiting’.)

Techdirt points out:

While it is annoying for some — and there should be an easy way to point out that a site shouldn’t be blocked, they are still providing the service for free, so there’s only so much people can do.

Thus further bolstering my claim that ‘free’ goods are fraught with trouble.

Panera Bread, Reston Town Center, Reston VA, as seen on 20 September 2004 at 5:30 p.m. That the wireless network was temporarily kaput probably had something to do with the fact that it was so deserted. That, plus everyone in Fairfax County seemed to be spending the hour stuck in traffic out on Reston Parkway.

Panera is a St. Louis thing; in St. Louis, they’re called ‘St. Louis Bread Company’, but it’s exactly the same restaurant once you’re inside (or inside most of ‘em, anyway: the very old locations still have their original decor, which isn’t as nice). I’ve been a fan of the place for fifteen years, and when I moved to Washington one of the things I missed most about St. Louis was the ability to get decent bread. I’m sure that there are good bakeries somewhere in Washingtonia, but you have to understand that in St. Louis there are St. Louis Bread Companies all over the place; you can get (reasonably) good bread anywhere.

Anyway, it’s always been a competent operation, and so I was not particularly surprised when Panera started offering free wireless network access in all their company-owned locations (and, it seems, in a good number of the franchise locations, too). They didn’t embark on a ’study’ like McDonald’s is famously supposed to have done somewhere; they didn’t sign up with T-Mobile for their laughably expensive service; and they didn’t roll the service out to a very few locations with a promise of more to come at some unspecified time in the (distant) future. They just installed the damned APs, stuck some very small stickers on the front doors, and turned the thing on.

And, best of all, they don’t explicitly charge for the service. It must cost them something to operate the network, and so a small part of the price of every bowl of soup they sell goes to pay for the network, but the point is: if you’re in the place, you’re connected, without buying anything else.

And this is great, because it’s a better accommodation for the way I use the network in a place like that. I have a home and an office; I am not going to do serious work in a noisy restaurant while running off battery power. I’m going to check my e-mail, read the news, and exchange a few IMs with people I know who don’t like talking on the phone any more than I do. Starbucks (to name one example) wants me to pay the Germans $30 a month — $40 a month if I don’t sign up for a yearly contract — to be able to use the network in their shops. This is about what I pay for my DSL service at home. For a service that I have use while running off batteries, in a place where I have to spend money just to occupy a seat, that’s more than a little too much for occasional use; so I will hang out at Starbucks’ less and Panera more.

Which is how I wound up at Panera with a little bit of time to kill the other day, and found the network to be hors de combat.

I stuck around for a while to see whether the network would start working again — I could connect to the local access point, and the DHCP server was working, but it appeared that their connection to the outside world had gone south — before giving up and leaving.

This is the problem with ‘free’ goods. That I’m not directly and overtly paying for the service means that Panera doesn’t expend a lot of effort to make sure that I’m satisfied with my non-purchase. On Panera’s regular public website, there appears to be no mention at all — aside from notations in the location-finder — of their wireless network service. I actually approve of this, because they don’t mention that they have air conditioning and electric lighting either, and I think the network in a place like this should be a basic utility.

But it’s not, yet, and so there’s not a crack team of people dedicated to tracking down and solving the problem — or at least to putting up some kind of notice of the problem to be served from the local AP — the way there almost certainly is should, say, one of the ovens break down.

All in all, though, if this is the worst thing that happens to me all month, I’m ahead of the game. But I’d still like to see a high-bandwidth works-(almost)-anywhere network service that charges some kind of reasonable price. As much as I like not paying for Panera’s service, I’d prefer to pay for what I really want.