The Hunt for the Ever-Elusive New Zealand WiFi

I’ll let you in on a little-known secret among regular mortals: New Zealand wifi is terrible. The accessibility of it, the speed of it, the consistency of it. It all sucks. I had read as much whilst doing my research for the country before I came here. Naively I assumed that it wouldn’t be as bad as everyone had made out.

It is.

During the last week we have spent countless hours sitting inside New Zealand’s public libraries and branches of McDonald’s, refreshing browsers and insanely checking connections on our smartphones. All of that effort has probably accounted for around two hours’ worth of actual fast, good internet access. And not all of it free.

Because of our struggles I’ve decided to give you a few tips on how to minimise the heartache of the broken connections you will inevitably come across.

– It is not uncommon for any internet access to be limited to a certain MB download limit. Because internet access is so expensive for locals to get and provide to customers, they tend to limit you as to the amount of time or usage you can have. So always make sure you shut down applications that use up a lot of your data usage by constantly refreshing themselves (e.g. Tweetdeck, certain anti virus software that regularly checks for updates, etc)

– Check out the local library of every city and town you are staying in. Some offer free WiFi (although this is usually limited to a certain time frame or MB). Some of these even leave their routers switched on overnight, so you will often find wily backpackers Skyping their family after dark on the steps of the library building.

– Locate your nearest McD’s. Always a failsafe in the WiFi world, and you often don’t even need to purchase anything if it’s busy enough to get away with it. However, again, you will be limited by time or MB so make sure you make the most of it.

– Many large coffee shop chains offer WiFi access when you make a purchase. Esquires and Gloria Jean’s are just two that I have seen so far. Again, it will be limited, but if you order the cheapest thing on the menu you will have deserved your half an hour free internet access.

– Some of the larger cities offer free WiFi for up to 30 minutes and this can sometimes be accessed up to twice on the same email address.

These are just a few of the tips that I have gleaned so far during my first week here. It has been frustrating, excruciating and sometimes downright murderous, but like me, you will figure it out in the end. Hopefully these tips will save you from a terrible fate. Or from murdering some poor worker at a hostel. Either way, there is internet access out there if you look hard enough for it.