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I am again staying at the Costa Mesa Marriot Residence Inn while here in California. Quite bored, and with a lack of anything better to do, it’s speed test time.

Apart from staying in a different building, the main difference this time is I brought my La Fonera with me so I wouldn’t need to be tethered to anything. The last time I was completely unable to get the Ethernet working, and only able to use the USB port to function. This time the ethernet is working just fine, and I had to use my laptop to get the La Fonera up and connected.

The internet access here, like most, uses a web based captive portal to force you to read and accept something. It also asks a couple questions, like would you prefer to have a public IP address? The La Fonera is obviously not going to be able to answer any of the questions, so it just sits there. Being unable to talk to the world, something inside of the La Fonera also triggered the captive portal for the encrypted “myplace” SSID, which then makes it impossible to use the wifi to enable the internet access for the room. At this point I decided to use an extremely helpful Linux utility, macchanger, and switch the laptop Ethernet mac address to my La Fonera’s. I then went through the captive portal, gave myself a public IP address, restarted the interface, and it was gravy. I plugged the Ethernet and power back into the La Fonera, and a couple minutes later I was in business. It’s almost been 24 hours since starting this session, so soon again I will have to go through the portal. Maybe this time the La Fonera captive portal won’t trigger.

Enough background story on to the numbers.

San Francisco, CA
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Parsippany, NJ, USA

Note: There is a huge difference in speed compared to my last stay.

Miami, FL, USA
Palo Alto, CA, USA