[Atheist]

I'm staying at a small hotel and was pleased to discover they had wireless Internet access so I won't have to go to the local Internet cafe to do my work. Or so I thought. I connected easily to their network and immediately went to Speedtest.net to test out the connection. 150ms ping time, 263kbps down, 213kbps up. Believe me, that's the best you're gonna get here in Tobago. Fast enough for me to do my work (which requires multiple Remote Desktop Connection sessions). Here's were it gets weird. First thing I noticed is that Adium quickly connects to MSN and AIM but cannot connect to Yahoo. Countless reboots and reopening of Adium do nothing. I find Mail sluggish at times. Frequently my mailboxes show the connection error symbol (!) however hitting the "Get Mail" button will rectify this. Browsing works fine. Relatively speedy and no issues with any specific kinds of content. Skype seems to be working fine. Remote Desktop Connection can't connect to anything.

I'm more an Applications Programmer type so I'm not too knowledgeable about the intricacies of network protocols. Anyone have any insight what would cause behavior like this? I seriously doubt they are blocking certain protocols. They seem the types that have just enough knowledge to plug in the wireless router and give it password.

Well.. I'm off to the Internet cafe. If you have any suggestions... feel free to pass them along. I'd rather do my work from the hotel.

[macmend]

this may be their firewall I would think

[CharlesS]

You could try doing a traceroute to the servers you can't reach, and see where the packets are getting lost.

[Atheist]

CharlesS,

I should have mentioned, I tried a traceroute and it never gets past the gateway's IP. It's very peculiar. But as I said, browsing worked just fine. Someone suggested playing around with the MTU settings. I didn't get a chance to try that and now I'm back home. It certainly was a weird problem.