Contact
The city-owned power company, SIL, has now added high speed internet by cable to its C.V., and along with that has been installing totally free wireless access points around town, notably in Place Palud, Place St. François, the Flon valley, and on the hill of Montbenon near the casino. It's rare now to find a café in Lausanne which doesn't have access to one of these. As an aside SIL also provides a range of wines to those same cafés including a nice little Chardonnay, and a fairly bold Gamay. Neat huh?
Metropole 2000
Rue des terreaux 15-19, (http://www.swiss-riviera....). a multi-level shopping mall which was built as an add-on to the metropole theater and tower has wireless access in each of its 3 food courts and 7 restaurants. free
Shiva Cyber-Bar
Rue du grand pont 10 metro m2 to flon, (http://www.cyber-land.ch). 6am-2am every day. shiva is a nice enough bar to warrant placement in the drink section above, and there's a decent internet cafe upstairs. the connectivity is usually quite good and although the machines do not have an ssh client installed there's no limit running programs off of the net. the catch: abnormally high prices on just about everything. 5 chf coffee 8 chf beer.
Fragbox
Rue de la tour 3 in the center of lausanne, one street above rue de l'ale. bus: place bel-air. an amazing cybercafã© and permanent lan party. they speak english, italian, german and portuguese. 5.-/hour and goes down to 2.-/hour with coupons. it's a highly equipped center, with 35 computers. you can install any software you need.
Lausanne, like most of Switzerland, is pretty safe in general. You are only likely to run into problems just outside of the entrances of popular dance clubs near closing time, when imported tensions sometimes show themselves. Name a conflict worldwide, odds are that both sides are represented among young people in Lausanne.