Late night or 24-hour free public wifi ?? (Raleigh, Cary: hotel, home)

[DeanJ44]

Does anyone know of a place that has good, strong, reliable wifi that is open at least until 1am around Raleigh? I need to find a place for just one night in a couple of weeks. I'd be sitting with my laptop from around 7pm to around 1am or so. I've had very little luck with Starbucks and cell/data won't cut it for this.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Sal_M]

Some McDonalds locations are open late and have Wifi.

[MikeJaquish]

Are you a TWC customer?
There are TWC WiFi Hotspots all around, and free to use for customers.

Home WiFi and TWC WiFi® Hotspots | Time Warner Cable

http://coverage.twcwifi.com/#/#c=35....2027513,%20USA

[cyn7cyn]

Does Sheetz gas station have WiFi?

[twingles]

McDonald's if there is one open.

[flamtap]

FYI, Verizon has decent coverage with XLTE in this area. Faster than my 20/2 home connection by far.

I was waiting at Frantz Automotive near downtown Cary and speedtest showed I was getting ~40Mbps downstream and significant (10 Mbps or more maybe?) upstream.

If you have a good tethering solution (and an ample/unlimited data plan) and can find somewhere close to a tower it's not a bad option.

flamtap

[Caarmour]

I used to do my papers when I was in grad school at the McDonald's on Western. Just stay safe and make sure you tell someone where you're going to be when you go out there.

[pdocstr]

Also, to the OP, if you do decide to take advantage of wi-fi at somewhere like McDonalds for a full six hours under high-bandwidth conditions (I assume this is what you mean when you say you don't want to use your phone plan), please be sure you order enough food to justify the free benefit for paying customers. Bandwidth is not free for any company to provide, it is budgeted into the overall expenses and they pay much more for it as a benefit to their paying customers. Probably something like $10 per hour worth of food orders is the general expectation at a fast food joint. Everything is monitored on cam as well. So please don't go in and order one cheeseburger and eat it slowly over six hours -- that's only abusing the benefit and costing everyone else more in the long run (either in price increases to food, to internet service, or to all of the above).

I realize you may not necessarily have a bottom-feeding strategy as your goal, but a lot of people do, and do not understand that "free for customers" means just that. Finding loopholes to exploit it means the benefit will be revoked for paying customers in the long run, or we will just find the costs passed along to us in the menu prices for food.

And yes, folks have been kicked out of McDonalds for mooching wi-fi in the past and not ordering food.

[DPK]

Originally Posted by cyn7cyn

Does Sheetz gas station have WiFi?

Yeah, pretty much all Sheetz have WiFi:
https://www.sheetz.com/locations/locations.jsp

Do a search and if the location in the list has a little icon for it, you're good to go. Sheetz is really probably one of the better alternatives. Their food isn't terrible, they've got random supplies should you need them, and they're open fairly late.

[apexgds]

You could find a hotel with free wifi in the lobby and befriend the night desk clerks. They might welcome some company.