"Skip Gundlach" wrote
in ink.net:

In your experience, do non-US-Lower48 cybercafés rarely, sometimes, or
routinely have either wifi or RJ45 high-speed access available to you,
or is it "use my machine and share my dialup" or equivalent?

Many Cybercafes now offer RJ45 type connections at the same $ rate as
using one of their machines. However, this varies widely. The larger
the cafe, the better the chance that they'll have one or more.

Likewise, what about wall-type power to plug into (realizing that we'd
have to carry converters to non-US-type power countries)?

Power plugs aren't an issue.

Our expected use would be in the Caribbean, primarily, but could be
throughout the Atlantic basin and Med.

Also, as we've not yet begun our extensive use of same, we're not
current on what cybercafés cost these days. Our limited experience is
all over the map, from free to outrageous. What's your experience?

The rates in the NW Caribbean have been $3 to $6 per hour. I will say
that the highest costs that we saw were in Key West where it was $10-$12
(or higher) per hour!

We're considering something which would require us to have high speed
access and perhaps a power supply available...

If you're counting on high speed then you had better forget cruising or
transform your cruising plans into moving from marina to marina. Either
that or pony up for ISDN access via onboard satellite.

Most cybercafes in the Caribbean utilize satellite based broadband for
their access and this has terrible propagation delays (about 3/4 of a
second end to end I believe). Once you get the data streaming, you're
in good shape, but if you use something that requires a lot of hand-
shaking, forget it. For example, I can only retrieve about 10 e-mail
messages per minute via POP via satellite. Another issue is that the
satellite links can be heavily over-subscribed, leading to large packet
losses. Also, outages are frequent due to equipment problems, weather,
etc, etc.

Overall, if you're trying to run a business that requires high speed
access from a boat, don't rely on Caribbean Cybercafes.

-- Geoff (who's been in Guatemala/Belize since January)