You need to post his picture! He isn't the only one in town. You can always tell because they sit in the corner with the screen away from the public and eyes glued down to the screen.

Even worse is the people who gather around and watch youtube videos loudly distrupting everyone in the place. That happened to me the other day. Three guys who I think were in a study group gathered around a laptop watching Jackass type videos.

If you have such an issue with the way others are utilizing the freely available public resources why don't you speak to the management. My guess is they really aren't too concerned because first, the person is a paying customer just like you, and second, online games like World of Warcraft actually don't eat up as much bandwidth as you think they do.

Sounds like you're being a bit hypocritical here as well. The gamer only hangs out at the coffee shop a couple times a week, while you are hanging out looking for people to blog about much more regularly if you know his schedule.

This site alleges that WoW consumes around 30K/s on average and 60K/s in big battles or in busy areas. That is on the high end of what I would consider acceptable usage for a public wifi hotspot. Surfing the web or writing email you may hit those speeds in bursts but most web surfing time is idle time since pages load and you read them so the average, over the course of an hour is probably really low -- something on the order of 5K/s or less depending on what kind of site you are going to.

Blogging consumes even less bandwidth than web surfing since most of the time is spent writing.

I don't think it's really appropriate to be streaming radio, video or playing MMoRPGs in coffee shops and at other public wifi hotspots.

I think the best way to resolve this is to turn on QoS on the router and deprioritize MMORPG, bittorrent, and other bandwidth heavy protocols. Of course there are ways around that but it would help.

Oh and did I mention that you are probably opening up a huge can of worms by mentioning this problem.

I think the schmucks who play World of Warcraft need to stay in their Mother's centipede ridden basement where they belong. Seriously, when the few moments of daylight you get on any given day are walking to the coffeeshop to play above mentioned game then you need to unplug. I know I may draw fire from my comments but c'mon, you know you feel a bit of shame. WoW player's are like compulsive porn surfers.

Can we please stop calling them public hotspots? They are not public. They are privately owned and operated for the convenience of their customers. They are open hotspots. That said, you're an ass if you use an open hotspot for anything bandwidth intensive without first asking management.

To stop WoW users, you need to block TCP port 3724 in the router settings. If you operate an open hotspot and you'd like to know exactly how to do that, just post a comment. Let me know what type of router you have, brand name and model number, and I'll tell you exactly what you need to do.

A few years ago when free hotspots started to become popular there was one coffee shop I would frequent. There was one guy I'd see everyone now and then that would use Bittorrent at the coffee shop. It was easy to notice since I recognized the tracker website (rhymes with Chevy Nova) he was getting torrents from. Of course, his activity bogged down the connection. (DO NOT DO THIS) The coffee shop was uneducated about security at the time and their router password was set at the factory default. I'd go into the router settings, enabling logging to determine what his IP address was and then I'd disconnect him from the network. I'd do this repeatedly until he got frustrated and left. I don't know if he truly got the message or ever changed his ways, but it felt good. Don't suck up bandwidth without permission and don't use someone else's internet connection to download copyright protected material. I'm no fan of the RIAA, but you shouldn't put someone under their gun for your activities.

Sarcastic but funny: