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About this tool
Rate a café for remote work on Wi-Fi speed, latency, noise, sockets, table size and seating against real call and concentration thresholds.
Scores a café out of 100 as a place to work, from nine measurements weighted by how much each one actually decides the day: download and upload speed, latency, noise in dB(A), sockets, table depth, seating, how long you can stay, and whether there is a toilet. It then applies hard gates rather than a single number — a café can score well overall and still fail 'video calls' because its upload sits under the 1.2 Mbps a 720p call needs or the room runs past 65 dB(A).
Open Coffee Shop Work Spot Rater on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Zoom's bandwidth figures, ITU-T G.114 latency limits and the NIOSH exposure limit, not vibes.
Tells you which specific measurement rules out calls or deep work, with the number that failed.
Noise and connection carry more weight than the coffee, because that is what ends a work session.
For video calls, about 1.2 Mbps upload for a 720p one-to-one call and about 3.8 Mbps upload for 1080p, per Zoom's published requirements. Upload is the number that matters and the one café connections skimp on — a shared line can show 50 Mbps down and under 1 Mbps up, which reads fast and fails on the first call.
Above roughly 62 dB(A) sustained concentration gets hard, and above 65 dB(A) your microphone starts sending the room rather than your voice. For reference, normal conversation at one metre is around 60 dB(A) and a busy café runs 70 to 80 dB(A). At 85 dB(A) you have reached the NIOSH recommended exposure limit for an eight-hour day, which is a hearing concern rather than a work one.
ITU-T Recommendation G.114 puts acceptable one-way delay at up to 150 ms, with 150 to 400 ms tolerable but noticeably degraded and beyond 400 ms unusable for conversation. Above about 150 ms people start talking over each other because the natural turn-taking gap disappears.
There is no rule, but the working convention is to buy something roughly every 90 minutes to two hours and to give up a large table at peak times. Many cafés post a limit during busy periods, and some switch the Wi-Fi off at lunchtime. If you need four uninterrupted hours with power, a library or co-working desk is a fairer trade for everyone.