I work mostly from home for my day job, but when I’m not Rick Conlee – Cloud Engineer, I hit the road and post up at a coffee shop somewhere to work. I need the movement of people through time and space to energize my creative pursuits.
I split my time between Upstate New York and British Columbia, so over the years I have been conducting a study of the quality of public WiFi and comparing the difference between all my usual haunts. Deville Coffee in Downtown Kelowna, BC, became my preferred location for me and The Hat Man to crank out endless screeds such as this, and work on our little shop of technical terrors, in Kelowna, BC (much of my “Run WordPress From RAM” stack was built on a laptop at this location). In Upstate New York, that place is Professor Java’s Coffee Sanctuary. Both Deville Coffee and Professor Java’s have great coffee (Professor Java’s is superior since they roast their beans right there in the shop, but Deville’s coffee is also pretty good too). Both also had the fastest coffee shop internet in their respective jurisdictions. That was until today when I sat down to write and decided to grab another speedtest at Deville to ensure the freshness of my dataset.
How Fast Is Deville Coffee’s Internet In Kelowna, BC?
Previous Speed Test Results
These are the average numbers based on my dataset of speed tests conducted prior to today, dating back to 4/24/2024. For download and upload speeds, higher is better. Anything over 100mbps is really good. For average ping, lower is better. Anything less than 10ms is considered really good. The number of clients could go either way, but usually there are between 5-10 people in here at any point during the day when I roll in to get coffee and do stuff.
| Item | Speed/Value |
|---|---|
| Average Download Speed | 301.32 mbps |
| Average Upload Speed | 292.59 mbps |
| Average Ping | 9.6 ms |
| Average Number of Clients Present | 8 |
Current Deville Coffee Downtown Kelowna Internet Speeds
This dataset is much smaller, but as I’ve been seeing people get up and leave, I keep rerunning the test and I am seeing the values remain mostly the same. The way the speedtest behaves, there are absolutely QoS limits being imposed on this connection. Here is where we are now:
| Item | Speed/Value |
|---|---|
| Average Download Speed | 10.59 mbps |
| Average Upload Speed | 5.38 mbps |
| Average Ping | 8.25 ms |
| Average Number of Clients Present | 5 |
Conclusion
This smells like it could be one of two things, either an internet plan downgrade by management to save a few bucks, or a bandwidth cap that was shoehorned in here by the ISP (if they have a 3rd party managing the guest wifi itself) because of excessive usage.
There are just shy of 40 million people in Canada, on average 8 of them are here at Deville Coffee in Downtown Kelowna. I is madness to assume that 8 people using the internet are causing excessive bandwidth usage. This is why I am leaning on these QoS shackles being a management decision, which is exactly why everything (from groceries to restaurant food, and ending at internet) is getting more expensive and less good across the board.
Do better, Deville. It’s 2025. With 10×5 mbps I can barely work on this google doc without it crashing. There are better ways to do QoS or Traffic Shaping that don’t involve hard caps. If someone is coming into your shop and seeding torrents, you can absolutely set max connection values and block a lot of the ports that BitTorrent uses. Most entry level Fortigates will do that. Whoever is managing your internet is dumb and doing traffic management like it’s 2005.
