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WiFi Free-For-All
my_LART writes "Information Week reports that WiFi access is becoming a free commodity. Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) has recently dropped its pay-per-use model and has installed free access to the WLAN in the food court and will be expanding access to the gates. On a similar note, Choice Hotels International is planning a WLAN rollout at its 370 Comfort Suites and 140 Clarion properties by the end of May. Choice Hotels International plans on expanding the rollout to two more of the company's brands by the end of the year. While this is great for us Road Warriors, how can this make financial sense? Choice Hotels can certainly markup the cost of the rooms by a few dollars per night, but how is PIT planning on reclaiming the costs? Regardless, lets hope other airports and hotel chains follow suit."
Easy, three little words, Airport Improvement Fee... Part of the way your $50 flight ends up costing $100+
drunk chemists
It makes sense because the incremental cost of providing the service is probably lower than the cost of the soap (lots in my flight bag) and the capital is less than the cleaning budget for the toilets for a day or two
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
At the ISP where I work, I can sit in the lobby and pick up about 3 other free wide open WiFi APs from the couch in the lobby.
Landing fees.
Could we just cover the globe and get it over with? :)
From a traveller's point of view 'free' wireless access will influence the traveller's choice of airport so the airport authority will benefit indirectly by attracting more passengers.
Also - first post
Normally, people that would do hacking, credit card fraud or just plain spamming would be traceable, not anymore so when half the internet is made out of freely accessible hotspots? Or would they block all interesting ports except port 80 and 443 to allow casual webbrowsing?
My local trendy cafe/art gallery, The Canvas (Lincoln and 9th in San Francisco, right on the corner) now has free wireless during business hours. You can walk in, and its full of people - most with a laptop, but they also have one important thing: the food they bought at the cafe. So, the Canvas can get 1.5 mbit DSL for $40 a month, and get at least 40 more people a day buying more food, probably at least amounting to the total cost of the DSL per month, every day.
Out of genuine curiosity, what are the uses of having wifi access at the gates? I can see in the food court to an extent where people might want to quickly browse or catch up on email while grabbing lunch before/between flights but are there really things that are that necessary we need to quickly get out on the net while at the gate?
Maybe the paying customers already made up for the initial cost of installation, and now the remaining costs must be so low they can make it available for free.
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
Of course you're all using encryption and firewalling your laptops (via iptables running on Linux of course) so that the guys who run these open APs can't sniff too much from your boxen (lappen?)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
There are at least two ways the airport can pay for this. One is to include it in the fees charged to the airlines: landing fees, rental of hangar and counter space, various other services. Another is to include it in the rent paid by shops and restaurants.
While this is great for us Road Warriors, how can this make financial sense?
Simple, Airports get more business (& more fees), Food courts get more people grabbing a danish & a little wi-fi access (most of these road warriors just want to check e-mail anyway, not exactly high bandwidth stuff). Hotels get more business & higher paying business. The business traveler is not paying the bills himself & will tend to select the places with better amenities. Full hotel with free Wi-Fi vs. Empty hotel with no or $20/night Wi-Fi.
Since most quality hotels are quite willing to offer free cable internet access within their rooms, why shouldn't airports and public areas with lots of retail/food businesses (such as shopping malls) follow suit? You provide an extra reason for well-heeled Wi-Fi users (who generally have more money to spend than your average joe) to stick around and spend money on coffeeshops, etc. Plus they will be more likely to return.
I bet those places that offer free Wi-Fi will soon be satisfied that it's a cost that pays for itself, and we can expect the trend to continue.
Can hackers, crackers, and file sharers take advantage of this public WiFi?
Sniff credit card numbers on the wireless network and charge them "convenience fees" which most flyers probably won't complain about :) Lazy americans (myself included)
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't these kinds of WiFi access points be an ideal place to upload a virus or any other type of malicious code onto the internet? I mean, it would be almost untraceable, right? If so, it would seem that almost anyone could write the code/test it on their own machines, and then unleash it on the world from one of these points.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Think of it as a value-added service - Choice hotels wouldn't even have to mark-up the price of the rooms to cover the marginal cost of WiFi. If I, as a road-warrior, have a choice between a hotel with WiFi and a hotel without, I'm going to choose WiFi. Some people will choose it even for a price premium, but then you start getting into economic slopes & such that I haven't messed with in ages.
Similar for the airport - granted, the market there isn't as fluid, but if the airport starts gaining more interest because it offers free WiFi, it can gain more shops and fast food outlets (= rental revenue), and possible in the long run (and by a long shot) attract marginally more airline business.
Like most people, I think WiFi will become a commodity. It is a relatively inexpensive service to provide that provides a competitive advantage in the short term; as more companies adopt it, it lessens the competitive advantage because everyone has it, and hence, becomes a commodity. Consumers everywhere win!
two words: spammers' gateway
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What costs? You mean the $60/month for a DSL the DSL line that's shared by via 802.11 here? That's petty cash, not a cost.
It's so cheap it doesn't make sense to charge for it. The administrative overhead of charging will eat most of the income because not many people will pay. But a lot of people would use it and be appreciative if it's free generating far more valuable goodwill.
I worry that all this free access will make it harder to catch pedophiles who can stop by the airport lounge and download/upload to their perverse heart's content and get away with it. They could toss a USB Wifi adapter in a garbage can and delete files of their hard drive in case a security guard is closing in.
There may be a sucker born every minute, but I find that rate strikes me as low when watching people snatch up $6 shit-burgers from under a heat lamp at airport food courts. I'm sure the glut of people hanging out in the food court for wifi, who just may need a snack will take a healthy bite (baddum-ching) out of the wifi bill.
You know what?
Well, I'm on the road in Memphis this week and was surprised that the Embassy hotel had wireless running (the fact that I can post this proves it's working).
There doesn't seem to be any signs saying that it's alive but it's working here.
So it seems to be hit and miss as far as which hotels have working connectivity.
(And yes, I know that Embassy isn't part of the Choice chain).
Can hackers, crackers, and file sharers take advantage of this public WiFi?
Now why would they want to do a thing like that?
Right now Starbucks has contracts with t-mobile for its hotspot use. It rugs $20 a month and you can use it at all Starbucks and selected airports. I like the idea of having it free, who doesn't like free? But the way i see it if as an poster above in San Francisco said it will increase business for any cafe that does it, even places you have to wait i.e. laundry mat, or even in malls.
Good god. I "work from home", so I often go to the local cafe with free WiFi for a change of pace. All my work stuff is done through encrypted VPN, and I use a software firewall and SSL for everything else. So I'm running EffeTech's HTTP Sniffer to debug my app server, and by default it dumps ALL HTTP traffic on the LAN. So I saw all full HTTP request and responses from all the laptops in the cafe. Mostly dull web surfing, but a lot of people check email using plaintext connections, which blew my mind.
~ The Fudge Report @ http://mywebpages.comcast.net/fudgereport/
Service. Say it again with me, s-e-r-v-i-c-e. Remember that out dated concept? Where we actually got more for our money?
It's hard to believe any airline giving us a service like wifi for free, but it would be a step in the right direction for an industry in deperate need of some good PR. Hopefully, this roll out continues and we see wifi continue to grow across the nation.
I agree this wifi free-for-all is getting out of hand. Heck, I've got three different neighbors providing free wifi! ;-)
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It will drive more business people to use that airport then the ones in Ohio. If businessmen/women have to travel and have a choice they will take an airport that they get internet access. I know I check which airports have T-Mobile hotspots in them. I prefer those over others since I have a hotspot account.
Scott
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
It's exciting to hear that wireless internet is becoming more prevalent in public places. It seems the US of A has been several paces behind other countries such as S. Korea when it comes to adoption of widely available, public internet access. Hopefully the ease of setting up wireless networks will remedy this situation.
My excitement to have instant information (via the Internet) at my fingertips, is, however, rather subdued when I consider the lack of precaution many people take securing their computers and networks. The recent spate of worms has proven a _real_ bother - my school network has been slowed to a grinding halt with the excessive bandwidth consumed by all this malware floating about.
The possibility that these worm issues escalate in direct proportion to the number of communities who go wireless is a concern of mine. I'm curious if any of you have read studies comparing wireless and wired networks, with respect to the rate of security issues that develop within large-scale communities?
Just this past week, as a part of my Baltimore -> San Francisco roadtrip, I stayed at a Days Inn in Farmington, New Mexico. This is a small town up in the way remote area of north-western New Mexico.
I was going to stay at the Holiday Inn there, but what made me change my mind when I rolled into town at 12am was the big banner on the side of the Days Inn which touted "Fee broadband access."
Who would pass that up? Days Inn got my business, and my PowerBook got a open WAP with a great signal in the hotel room. The Days Inn seemed to have a rather decent ADSL connection from local provider digii.net
The free WiFi access is a win, win situation for both sides. People get free internet access which allows them to make better use of thier laptops while waiting at the airport, which we all know takes forever now, and for the airport and hotels it brings in people who want to stay and travel where they can get free WiFi access.
But, mainly this is a building block for a greater purpose of allowing internet access from literally anywhere.
-This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
Massively, might I add.
Who wants to bet this has some VERY tight tie-ins with the TSA?
Sure, they'll give you free internet access (since your tax dollars subsidize it anyway)... But, you'd better not leave "disney.com"; Otherwise, expect the boys in blue to start playing stinkfist with you...
we'd have to start replacing it with 802.45 :)
and the worst part is, he failed it to a legitimate +5 Insightful first post! It just doesn't get any more failed than that!
they are going to pay for it by not providing soap and not cleaning the toilets twice a month? :)
Simple.
Same way Starbucks does...get you in a seat, and sell you stuf...
Hotels: "Vacancy, Color TV, Pool, WiFi"
Dinners: "WiFi for Your Convenience!"
Theaters/Stores: "WiFi Inside!"
It's a cheap commercial draw. Combined with public networks, wISPs, Mobile WiFi, etc. the future is looking increasingly cord-free.
I grew up in Pittsburgh and the airport was designed as an "Airmall" where people waiting for flights or waiting to pick people up would shop and eat. Unlike many airports, the prices are no more than they would be on Main Street. However, all of the shops are on the secure side of the security controls, and so when after 9/11 they changed the rules so that only ticketed passengers could go through security, the shops and restaurants lost half of their customers. Part of the motivation must be, I guess, to help out the restaurants by hoping that passengers will linger for a coffee or a Big Mac while they check their mail before they go to their gates.
Coffe shops, book stores, airports, hotels, what's next!? You know where I want to see WiFi access? How about the doctors office, or the DMV? Where I unwilling have to spend hours of my life waiting for someone or something! Or what about WiFi at the grocery store so I can post my shopping list to my blog and then read it off to myself from the comfort of the grocery store asiles.
**Ends Rant**
-This sig has been discontinued after a sudden realization.
Advertizeing of course. People are spending more time in airports than ever before. Giving them something to do reduces stress and makes everyone happier. But it also gives advertizers a market of financially well of people that can afford airline tickets and laptops. Expect to see advertizing with web url's all the more. And remember sitefiner... The airports can do the same thing. They can also supplant web pages temporarily with their own with click throughs. There are millions of ways they can afford it.
I predict that there will be a market for software that will degrade the quality of a WIFI connection based on the time from first discovery and extended by the amount of coffee (or other valued product) ingested.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
I had the same thought - I could vote either way; a) Nobody is watching because noone is paying to have it monitored, or b) mini-carnivore is cranked right up to the max looking for interesting traffic that might indicate an imminent threat.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Don't think that you are completely secure and private when operating from such an access point anyway. You still have a MAC address. If you want to believe that Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft don't have a database with your MAC address in it, that's your business, but more than one computer user has learned the hard way that the MAC address identifies them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's going to be real interesting when access points start to internetwork and route through each other rather than going through a land line intermediary. The effective cost of bandwidth will drop to the cost of wireless equipment... essentially nothing.
SoupIsGood Food
First: Internet Acess becomes more and more self-evident. There are plenty of services you expect in an first-class-hotel. Your shoes are cleaned. Someone makes the bed while you are not in the room. There is a mini-bar. All this is inclusive and you pay nothing extra.
Second: I don't think the costs are enormous. An airport is spending a few thousands dollars for hardware - do you know hom much a plane tyre costs?
Everything else being similar I'd go where I could get free internet.
At this point its probably more expensive to bill and track than it is to deliver. I hope it rapidly becomes a case where no wifi is the exception. Heck there might be cases where no office connection is a feature!
LS
1. You post on /. that PIT has WiFi.
2.Travelers with a choice between PIT and, say, Cincinnati choose PIT.
3. Profit!!!
Within the last month, the our local airport has had WI-FI Installed throughout the building here in Moline, Illinois (www.qcairport.com). I doubt its addition will raise any fees for anyone. Mediacom, our local cable company/Hi-speed cable provider, has big signs posted around saying "Free WI-FI Provided by Mediacom Online" so, one can assume that the airport may actually be making money or at least getting it for free by providing advertising space for Mediacom and Mediacom providing free internet access.
www.insanelygood.com
DocChaos -------- I may be crazy, but then again I may be crazy.
No one charges for air conditioning or heat, even though there are days when people would gladly pay for it. As other have said, the cost of limiting and charging for WiFi access is often much greater than what you get from the charges.
It doesn't make financial sense. No business that relies solely on providing wireless access for profit will succeed. What's probably going to happen is that wifi access is just going to become an expected service of any respectable establishment, like pay phones or air conditioning.
I bet airconditioning and heating costs a lot more than WiFi+Internet.
;).
And the airport provides these to anyone who walks in for free.
Heck without the dynamic access controls and payment stuff it's only slightly more complicated than providing piped in music and announcements.
Of course if more people started supporting my suggestion of using http://here/ to get more info about the network you are using "here", there'll be more scope for some interesting stuff. e.g. malls can redirect you to a different website depending which Mall Zone's "here" you are in - listing specials. Heck you might even be able to vote for the piped in music you want
Similarly for a cafe - you could chat/play games with patrons locally.
If you really can do that, you can do it right now to most users on the Internet. Most users don't have a hardware firewall in place. If they have a software firewall in place they will have on on their laptop, so no differences there. Do you think you need to be in the same room with the guy to send him that virus? Do you think those users are logging your IP address so that you can only magically infect them from a public IP address? The flaws in your logic are that you don't just send a worm and have it somehow infest another system, unless you're Will Smith or Jeff Goldblum; and if you could such attacks would be much easier to carry off driving around an office park or the 'burbs than to do so in a location where cameras have taken your picture, security people have made you show ID, computers have a record of your being there, and a bunch of bored gun-ho security monkeys are looking for a fight.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It makes sense because the incremental cost of providing the service is probably lower than the cost of the soap (lots in my flight bag) and the capital is less than the cleaning budget for the toilets for a day or two.
It also makes sense because providing the internet feed is dirt cheap, while trying to meter it and collect fees is NOT.
It's called a "marginal service" - like the shaver outlet in the bathroom (without a meter and coin slot), providing lighting (rather than requiring you to bring your own flashlight), or the free elevators (without a ticket taker). It's MUCH easer and cheaper to include the cost of the service in the overhead cost of the environment (and the goods and services you buy there) than to try to bill for it specifically.
Closer to the shaver outlet than the elevator, by the way. Unmetered internet service is dirt cheap to provide. Installing and maintaining elevators is DARNED expensive.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I flew there for the first time a few months ago, and was happy to find open WIFI in the food court, as well as shops and food that were not jacked up to normal airport prices. Nothing there was any more than at a regular shopping mall. Since then, I have intentionally scheduled my flights back to where I work so that my layover is at PIT. If I'm stuck there a few hours, I could care less. It's perfect for catching up on mail and surfing. In my case, it IS making a difference.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Right next to the WiFi hub is a carnivore box, courtesy the FBI?
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Wow - imagine the uproar at companies providing better services! Is it so implausible to think that things can get better for the same price?
This may have been said already, but I think the WiFi is already at the gates. On a recent layover in Pittsburgh, I pulled out my PowerBook while waiting for my flight to Toronto... low and behold, there was access. This was in a US Airways terminal.
Just though I'd say so.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
There are at least two ways the airport can pay for this. One is to include it in the fees charged to the airlines: landing fees, rental of hangar and counter space, various other services. Another is to include it in the rent paid by shops and restaurants.
But do you have any idea how CHEAP this would be in an airport environment, if it's NOT being metered?
Figure a couple dozen wireless routers (at $100 each). An fat pipe internet feed (which they probably already HAVE, and can piggy-back on for essentially free if they give the hotspots a lower priority), a bit of cat-5 strung through the ceilings, a couple of hubs, and a port on the router (which they ALSO already have). Call it a one-time investment of a few grand. (Costs more for labor to install it than to buy the parts.)
Recurring costs of less than a grand a month or so for maintainence. Call it two grand if you're actually PAYING for the bandwidth. Power for the machines is below the noise.
HOW many passenger-trips through a major airport in a month? (SFO was 41 million per year in 2000, almost three and a half MILLION per month. $2*(10**3) / 3*(10**6) = $0.000666... seven ONE HUNDREDTHS of ONE CENT per passenger-trip.
Somehow I don't think anybody will feel the pinch.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Simple; Volume.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
hacking - maybe it's time we make our systems secure and hackerproof credit card fraud - maybe it's time we stop considering 16 digits to be enough to authorize a transaction just plain spamming - maybe it's time we start bouncing un(cryptographically)signed mails
Hacker-proof is just silly. Nothing is hacker proof. But even so, the issue here is that free wi-fi everywhere means hacking becomes much, much easier to do safely. You remember how they caught the Blaster worm guy because someone saw him launching it at the library? How are you going to catch someone who only has to be within 150 m of a base-station and could just hide in a toilet stall with his laptop?
More than 16 digits on a credit card? That's like requiring 45 digit passwords. It just makes people more likely to write the damn thing down, which actually LESSENS security. With a 16-digit credit card number, people often memorize it, and less often store it in a text-file on their computer for easy reference.
As for cryptographically secure e-mail... well, whatever. The e-mail system is so badly broken it's a wonder we still get service at all. Cryptography is just one of a dozen issues.
And if no one had ever been caught through their MAC address, this would be a good argument. But people have. Some hardware and software might not support that simple MAC address change, and most users will not think to do it. And very few abusers who are stupid enough to try to infect systems in a place where they had to show ID to get in, had cameras take their picture, have computers keeping records of their being their, and likely have security cameras watching and maybe even a bit of electronics listening in on what they do on that wireless link, will be smart enough to cover all of their traces, including the MAC address.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I got bumped off a flight and spent 8 hours waiting around Pittsburgh International Airport last August. Huge airport. I think I had a drink in every bar there(gotta be a tleast a half dozen). Wi-fi access certainly would have helped pass the time...especially if it was free!
once you go slack, you never go back
hookers.
Free Hooker access points. You would have people lined up around the block. Hell get rid of the damn planes, they just cost too much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't think that you are completely secure and private when operating from such an access point anyway. You still have a MAC address. If you want to believe that Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft don't have a database with your MAC address in it, that's your business, but more than one computer user has learned the hard way that the MAC address identifies them.
One traveler to another "I seem to have forgotten my wireless card. May I borrow yours? I need to check my e-mail"
"Sure" unplugging the PCMCIA card "I've already checked mine."
There are other ways to get a single use mac address.
The truth shall set you free!
Oh really? When I installed one on my XP notebook, I had to load drivers from the CD as well. Other people with different brand cards need different drivers. And this is certainly one area where Linux doesn't make it easier than Windows; most wireless cards don't even have Linux drivers. I don't really see this as an easy way to use someone else's MAC address, even if you could find someone willing to just let you share their card.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Some hotels in Japan have been offering free broadband for 1 or 2 years now - especially the really small ones favoured by business travellers. It's just another way to attract people to prefer that hotel ... or maybe even that airport.
... perhaps they are doing it to attract airlines to the airport ?
It certainly works when it comes to hotels, but not knowing much about the geography and availability of airports in Pittsburgh, I can only guess they might have some competition ? Airports are commercial ventures too
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Cost to DSL providers for providing net access to a residence is down to $20/mo. Quintuple that to $100/mo for shits and giggles. Tack on another $100 for the access point.
For a year, that's $1200+$100 = $1300 / 365 = $3.56 per day per access point. If your business can make an extra three and a half dollars per day by having net access around, you should set up wifi.
Of course, if you TRY to charge, and TRY to set up all these complicated access mechanisms, you have to spend all this money on support -- money you never make back.
--Dan
Idaho Sucks. Now go away. And tell your friends.
PIT can simply write (or download root kits and assemble) virii/worms based on commonly known platform vulnerabilities such as this.
Then, they can loose such nasties in the gate area to gather valuable privacy and financial data of oblivious surfers.
Or, they could bump the passenger egress airport fee by a buck...
The trend of moving wi-fi access from a pay-per-use service to a free commodity seems to be a trend mostly in the US perhaps? I'm not sure about other countries, but here in Paris, a lot of wi-fi in public places (train stations and the like) is currently free but will become a pay-per-use or subscriber-only service later in the year (I assume once the network is complete and they have their invoice and payment systems up and working)
I got fired, formed my own consulting company and now our business is taking off and my old company is in Chapter 11.
But that's beyond the point. One of my favorite places o go is a locally owned coffee house. About 4 years ago they bought a couple used laptops and rented then out for $7 an hour. About 18 months ago, they started giving free WiFI, guess what, they've made a lot more money, because people like me use it to work away from work. I deal with customers from 10 AM - 5PM, then about 5:30 goto the coffee shop, grab a bite to eat, a bottomless cup and do my work until about 8PM, then go home. Guess what though, I am so regular as soon as I walk in, they tell the exact bill and everything's ready togo. We often meet clients there as well because of the asmostphere. $100 in gear and $80 a month for a commerical Cable connection is pretty cheap to bring in repeat customers. Hell, they proably almost recover the bill from me alone. When they switched to free mode, two new coffee houses were opening in the area. Guess what, they are still in business, one is out of business, and the third is still there, but doesn't do near the business as the local favorite.
Hotels are another story. I was at a meeting/seminar at a hotel and I was the first to test their WiFI connection. Its extremely handy and we quickly booked our next daylong seminar because of the easy access. Now others offer the same, but its a convience, and if they can improve bookings by 5 - 10%, it will more than pay for the service.
My last story is that of our favorite all night diner. Its not uncommon for us to work until 1 or 2 AM. Usually take an hour off for news and Leno's monologue then go out for coffee and a late night snack. Well, we noticed that they too put in free WiFI access. We sometimes have working lunches there as well, although its not widely used as say the coffee house.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
When my only option for broadband in a hotel is WiFi, I choose the WiFi. If I can get ethernet, I always choose the copper.
I've discovered that far too many hotels with WiFi have only a single access point, usually somewhere in the region of the front desk. All too frequently, I end up in a room somewhere near the other end of the hotel. In those cases, if I can even get a signal it's so weak I get a better connection dialing in to GlobalCrossing.
10 wireless access points: $1,000
Internet T1: Already in place, so free
dsniff, mailsnarf, etc. sensor: Teds old P-400, so free
Getting thousands of people to provide their personal info unencrypted over our network every day so that we can re-sell it to marketers: Priceless
Sorry. Had to be done.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
WLAN access costs not so nice amounts...
around 50eur/month for 512/512 connectivity supposed to be 24/7, works barely, a lot of downtimes and in many cases not achieving 512/512 speed at all, plus large costs to close the deal for the connection...
so, welcome to finland where everything costs a lot more than it should...
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Maybe having free wi-fi will get some people to check in earlier and therefore spread the congestion that usually happens 2 hours before the flight. I know I would check in an hour earlier if I could do something usefull with that hour, and wi-fi would give me the opportunity to.
Who do I talk to about getting a job setting up these Hotel networks?
It is getting to the point where one's hotel choice included whether hispeed is offered or not... no hispeed... no business...
I flew through Richmond, VA last month, and was pleased to find free wifi at the gates, and in the lounge and restaurant. It can't cost them all that much - you can't get in range without a plane ticket, and most people have better things to do than to turn up 8 hours early for a flight just to use the wifi, but it's useful to be able to get at email before a flight, and of course provides something to do while I'm waiting.
So if I ever go back to VA, I'm quite likely to fly out of Richmond.
It's quite an old concept in marketing, really. You make your customers happy by giving them a better experience of your product, and they will tend to spend more on it - in this case, buy more sandwiches in the food concessions, choose this airport over another nearby one etc. You might as well ask how it makes financial sense for an airport to provide customers with anything more than a wooden shack and a pit toilet. This makes sense in the same way that it makes sense for Island Outdoors[0] to give free coffee to everyone who comes in the shop.
;-)
It sometimes seems that businessmen can't see far enough beyond wringing every last penny out of their customers today to realise that by doing so they're putting off their customers of the future. That's where the {RI,MP}AA went wrong and I'm pleased to see this airport avoiding those mistakes: being a bit more generous to provide customers with a happier experience and hopefully, in the long run, drum up more business.
[0] Sorry, no link: they're an excellent hiking/climbing/etc. shop in Portree, Isle of Skye, Scotland and well worth giving your business to if you're in the area. See, free stuff = happy customers => free plugs on slashdot in return
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I recently had a trip to Anaheim and chose my hotel based on whether it had free high speed internet access (looked it up at GeekTels before I reserved my room) since I would be doing alot of downloading of documents for committee meetings that I had that week.
I would also plan trips to a particular airport if it had WIFI rather than nearby ones, especially if I have a layover. To fly to my parents house in Pennsylvania, I could fly into Cleveland, Erie, or Pittsburgh. I normally like Cleveland due to the lower fares, but also like Pittsburgh due to the nice shopping area with non-airport pricing and I like the airport train (which I worked on).
The airport in my little town of Fredericton NB Canada has had free wireless for quite a while, and in the past several months, the whole downtown area of the city has had free wireless. Yes, you can walk downtown, sit on a bench, open your laptop, and surf the net on 802.11g! In the next couple years, they will cover the entire city. Sweet.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
please?
Jed Blue gives free wifi access in certain airports, specificity JFK and I think Long Beach.
Where I live Fort Lauderdale airport has had free WiFI for sometime. I'm not really sure if they meant to, but they do.
Actually I think I'm one of the few homes in my neighborhood that has secured my home WiFi network as I seem to be able to go all over my neighborhood and connect to a lot of different networks.
I still pay for T-Mobile's hotspot service seeing as it is only $20 a month, but it is getting to the point of why pay when it seems to free all over the place due to people not securing their networks.
something to surf while using your free WiFi
I dont know how they are reclaiming the costs, but it might be from the insane taxes we have here.
They think they can tax their way to prosperity when the best thing to do is lower the marginal tax rate so that Pittsburgh becomes more attractive to business than everywhere else.
Let's face it; if a business offers free wifi then I choose it over a pay place every time. A couple of businesses near me have it. I am much more likely to go have lunch or breakfast there where I can work a little and eat. A couple of hotels that I have stayed at in the last year had free access.
It is a business differentiator and it isn't all that expensive. Most hotels and restaurants/coffee shops will already at least have a DSL line for credit cards, the manager's computer, etc. It doesn't cost much more to throw an extra box on the line and share it. I would bet that a lot of these places are putting it in for only a couple of thousand dollars.
Security is a problem at any hotspot. I use SSH to protect my email. Most corporate users either access their email through VPN or a web mail site that is SSL encrypted. Any IT guy who is letting his users access his server from the outside in any other way is asking for trouble.
The free hotspots that I have used have all redirected me to a website that explains who is running the node, that it is for their customers only, and that you are to use it good and not evil. After you agree to the terms, you are free to go about your business. I don't know how iron clad this is but I imagine that it offers decent enough legal protection if they felt comfortable doing it.
It is worth noting that all of the businesses that I have seen offering free hotspots are doing well. I would say that probably 70% of the customers don't have any idea what wifi is but the 30% that do love it and come back for more. That little bit extra can be the difference between breaking even and making a good profit.
Mag Lights were cool ten years ago. The various lights by Sure Fire are now the way to go. A tiny Sure Fire powered by two lithium batteries is way brighter than 4 D-Cell powered Mag Light.
I'll admit to paying for wifi at MSP, but I also get to expense it, so the cost doesn't matter to me. What drives me batshit is the scarcity of *outlets* at airports! Maybe this is how they plan to pay for it, by putting in paid electricity!
What's the deal with outlets at airports, anyway? I know it'd be far more expensive to add outlets in the middle of the floor or in places where there was no easy access to power, but it's hard to find ANY outlets, and when you do find them they're often far from your specific gate, in the middle of a hallway, or just nonexistent. Part of the reason I find this so surprising is that most electical codes require an outlet every 6 feet or something, yet in an 2000 sq ft area I found three, with only two in a usable place -- and when I dug around in my bag looking for something, I had two people approach me asking if I was leaving, eyeing the outlet.
Battery power is fine if you don't turn on the laptop during the flight or carry a couple of extra batteries. I don't (weight, etc), and I like to save my batteries for watching DVDs during the flight. But with outlets so scarce, I think I might be forced to get a couple of extra batteries just to deal with the lack of power.
Besides the tongue-in-cheek reference to paying for power, the other idea that occured to me is the dreaded advertising model for wifi -- give away access, but transparent proxy all web requests and add popup and banner hijacking advertising. Sure, it won't affect those of us that use VPN or ssh tunnels to our own proxies, but they can solve that with NAT and/or locked-down access.
Opened up my TiBook and it found a nice strong signal and I was on the 'net. Well ... my Orthopod to be exact ... but this article was an interesting coincidence!
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
I run a hotel, part of a chain.
I've been to meetings where longtimers 'cursed' jokingly the first hotelier to put soap in a guest room, cause now EVERYONE does it, and it's just an ugly expense..
think about it, yes, free today pays for itself to the front runners, but when it is everywhere, it won't generate new business, it'll just allow you to keep up with everyone else, it's then an expense-non self supporting..
it's an abysmal trap- short term plum, long term lemon.
Believe it or not, but the best way to pay for airport wifi is to get the airlines to sponsor it. That way they can proudly claim to support the white collar worker in his ever growing lust for a permanent state of being "at work". Actually, the Longbeach Airport, in Longbeach, CA also has free wireless access, sponsored by the greatest airline out there... JET BLUE!! It makes flying in/out of there a real pleasure.
Aren't librarians newly vested government agents sworn to send every byte to the NSA? Whoops!
Escalators are also really expensive to maintain, maybe even more than elevators. You know why they're always out of service? Because they break down and need maintenance all the time.
I've been very pleased to find *free* wired ethernet connections at a number of Best Westerns, even in places like Muscogee, OK and Springfield, MO. Holiday Inn Express seems now to have a lot of wi-fi enabled locations, too. I've been very annoyed with some Hiltons that don't have broadband and insist on charging &.75 per local phone call with additional charges after 30 minutes while right next door a Hampton owned by the same company has unlimited free local calls. Guess which one I choose. I've run into other higher-end hotels that either charge for broadband if they have it, or charge for local calls if they don't The worst one I ran into was a major hotel in downtows Ft. Worth, TX where they said they had Internet access and I saw an ethernet jack on the wall I agreed to pay the extra fee of $9.95 for it only to learn that it was actually just another phone line! I said no thanks and used the room line for my dialup and got charged for local calls. :(
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
One of the products our small startup as tried to market in Southeastern Virginia is basically free to the customer wireless internet access. Everyone knows how much a DSL circuit costs, and we see it as an added benefit for customers. The business can use the internet circuit for other uses as well, weather it is POS or security.
It is actually kind of odd, but I went to the local airport board and said "If you will pay the $100/month DSL fee, we will provide all of the hardware, installation, and support to provide free wireless internet at Norfolk International Airport"
I got turned down. They said I should bid on putting in for-pay kiosks. They couldn't get involved without a competitive bid process. $1200 a year we are talking, they spend that much on one run of advertisements (15 or so) on the local radio station.
We have a setup that blocks outbound pop3 requests, as well as a few other important things to prevent abuse (spammers, some attacks). With the number of cameras and the number of other open wireless access points why would someone go to an airport to commit a crime.
It is a rough sell. We tried malls, but they don't want people to do anything but quickly buy things and leave. Hotels want the signal in every room, and many are serviced by lodgenet.
So at this point we have only managed a limited number of deployments. The airport though, I figured it would benefit everyone so I would put down the money for the hardware. Good publicity and a useful service.
Doh. Our setup has a splash page with ads and security information that the user must view, then they are free to web browse. We still might end up in one of the local malls, time will tell. We are going to try to get one of the other businesses at the airport to sponsor it, but no telling if it will work. TMobile has one of those hotspot things, but it is only at one particular gate (how useful).
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
While this is great for us Road Warriors, how can this make financial sense?
It's called value. Wouldn't you choose a hotel with free Wi-Fi access over one that doesn't? It doesn't make financial sense for hotel guests to get complimentary breakfasts, either.
I say the business owners are going to suffer the cost, and they're going to pass the charge down to the consumer.
'Better stop at the fast food joint before you hit the airport in Pittsburg....
Anyway, it's not as if the pay-per-use guys aren't also transmitting data in the clear now. Unless they are also running VPN (which, again, they should be).
sulli
RTFJ.
Sacramento International Airport (SMF) claims to have free Wi-Fi coverage for all of Terminal A.
When waiting in Harrisburg (or was it BWI, I forget), they had "internet stations" where you had to pay like .50 a minute for a connection. I found the wireless network and used that instead. Even nice enough to assign me a DHCP address. "Any" didn't work though. Had to know the SSID. Nice security there.
It's called a "marginal service" - like the shaver outlet in the bathroom (without a meter and coin slot), providing lighting (rather than requiring you to bring your own flashlight), or the free elevators (without a ticket taker). It's MUCH easer and cheaper to include the cost of the service in the overhead cost of the environment (and the goods and services you buy there) than to try to bill for it specifically.
Which is one of the reasons that online micro-payments also won't take off either. No matter how much you attempt to automate the process, transactions have a base cost that can't be gotten around. Especially if the transaction gets disputed and you're only charging $0.05 for the product (maybe making $0.02 profit). Resolving the dispute will take 15 minutes of time, or around $5 in salary and benefits, which wipes out the profit from 200-500 other transactions.
Conspiracy theory of the day:
They will sell your surfing habits to the highest bidder. You can't complain. After all, the policy was clearly stated in the item 53, subparagraph XIV of the click-thru agreement.
You can never equivocate too much.
My grandmother died and so we got plane tickets rather spur of the moment to go to her funeral. The government assumes that terrorists are impetuous and never plan things out so people who get plane tickets spur of the moment are sometimes randomly checked. My, I think Delta ticket, had "XXX" or something in one corner. I was carrying a graphics tablet which they painstakingly searched. If you travel with other people, everyone should check their tickets and determine who if anyone will be searched and then manipulate carry-ons to minimize search time. i.e., I should have seen the Xs and given the tablet to my father to carry.
It also makes sense because providing the internet feed is dirt cheap, while trying to meter it and collect fees is NOT.
Tangentially related thought... If I stay at a hotel costing over $150/night, local calls from the room cost $1.50 each, and high speed internet access costs $10-15 per day. If I stay at a motel costing $45/night, local calls and internet are free. It's not so much the cost of providing the service, but what people, particularly those on expense accounts, are willing to pay.
The future of pay wi-fi providers such as T-Mobile seems limited.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Libraries in King and Kitsap Counties in Washington State have had free Wi-Fo for almost two years. No restrictions. No time limits.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I just stayed in a Raddison in Chelmsford, Mass, with free WiFi. It was set up so they could charge if they wanted to, but they didn't. Excellent!
I wanted to go visit the MIT Bookstore in Cambridge, but didn't remember where it was. I picked a random spot on Mass Ave between MIT and Harvard to pull over my car, found an open AP, googled for the MIT Bookstore, and got directions.
My favorite restaurant refuses to get WiFi "so people don't come in all day and surf the Web and not buy anything." Which is sad, because I go there with a lot of friends, and I'd like to videoconference with friends who are in other states.
Now.. we just need the FCC and other regulatory bodies over the globe to allocate a PROPER chunk of bandwidth, with more power and better rules, specifically for wifi.
Look how much has been accomplished in 2.4Ghz ISM...who would aruge that license-free use of this spectrum was not totally to the benefit of society.
Think of what things could be like if some real spectrum was allocated, with better power.
Short hop flights on Southwest are under $100. They can't jack the price up too much or people will just drive the 5 or 6 hours.
How can this be profitable? The same way adding other types of near-intangible value to products raises the PERCEIVED value of a product or service. Sure, hotels may make a little less money (until they quietly raise their room rates) offering WiFi service, but it raises their visibility with the WiFi-savvy traveller. Those folks will be more likely to come back, and tell their friends about the hotel chain, based on their positive experience.
CMH has had WiFi access throughout the airport for some time now. I happened to be coming home around Christmas time and saw a random sign while waiting for my luggage about WiFi being available.
I went down to an empty corner of the baggage claim area to wait for my ride to show up, and sure enough there was what appeared to be unhindered (no port blocking, etc) WiFi access. And I never really considered CMH to be one of the "leading edge" airports in the country.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
As for the airports, these are facilities that see tens or hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis and collect large landing, taxi, and takeoff fees from every airplane that passes through. Plus they sell food and magazines and all sorts of tourist garbage. Does anyone honestly believe that one or two hotspots in the airport restaurants would amount to anything that could not be covered by the change rounded off at the end of the day? It probably costs more to clean the bathrooms that to maintain WLAN hotspots at every terminal.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Back a few months ago the City of Portland made a good showing in being one of the most unwired cities in the USA. Thing is the City itself had nothing to do with this feat. What was the big stand out factor?
Free Community Wireless Networking nodes and hotspots put up largely by the Personal Telco Project (www.personaltelco.net)
The lesson here is to not wait for your local government or chamber to do this for you..DO IT Yourselves. The way the tech is now both in price and availability there is ample opportunity to build your own community network and show the supposed "big boys" how its done.
If you look around the country you will see lots of groups doing just this. Seattle Wireless, NYC Wireless, Bay Area Wireless Group..the list goes on and on.
-tomwsmf
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
airports are shopping malls for the airlines. Just think of united as sunglass hut and that's how they operate financially.
So it makes sense that the more people that choose a particular airport, the more attractive it is to airlines looking to lease terminals in the area... and the more you can charge them.
This is evident in the SF bay area where you have SF international, Oakland and San Jose to choose from. They each have their own features that makes flying out of one more appealing than the other depending on what you're after and they're all pretty well integrated into mass transit. You can take BART to either oakland or sfo and SJ flyers have access to the whole area via lightrail, caltrain and ACE.
Having free wifi would be a marketable perk for the road warriors that could make it more competitive for leases and flyers than it was before. It's a loss leader.
(btw, I'm mr_burns here, posting from a friends machine.)
Wi-fi support is as simple as installing a few thousand dollars worth of equipment. They'll recoup that by empting the trashcans 0.05 times less per average day for a month or two.
So, does this mean I need to buy one way tix (access to terminal) spend 12 hours in a hub sniffing every bit of wifi, bluetooth, etc and creating wealth by selling proprietary data back to the business/sales/engineering jockey dumb enbough to transmit it over the air?q
Actually it's next to no effort to give free WiFi access. It's connecting that access to the interent that starts to cost money. Anyone checked the adverts for that detail? Yeah, just kidding, but it starts to give me some bussiness ideas....hmmm...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
If your in an airport that charges for wireless access, try to position yourself near the President's club. They will sometimes have a free account and they never think to contain the signal.
Assuming they're AA or AAA batteries, they look like bullets on the x-ray. I remember going on a tour of an airport years ago, and this is one of the things they brought up. They also aren't fond of loose batteries.
Batteries lined-up end-to-end in a standard flashlight are commonplace, so they know what they are. A side-to-side configuration probably looks more like a loaded clip.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
The article includes a quite to the effect that this is the first airport in the US, and second in the world with free wifi. That's not true, I have found free wifi in a few large airports. And my smalltown local airport (TRI) has extensive free wifi throughout, plus free public terminals.
TRI's network is sponsored by $LARGE_POLLUTING_LOCAL_COMPANY, which happens to fly lots of employees to Atlanta on a semi-daily basis. I belive that it was economical for them to sponsor the free wireless because now their employees can get some work in at the airport. It probably paid for itself quite fast.
see shy jo
Keep in mind that the cost of operating an invoice system could be much higher than what they're making off of it. That doesn't mean they won't be losing money (looking just at the WiFi, ignoring the draw to buisness) but it may have turned out that it was more effective not to charge. This was the case with...okay I can't search for crap...some university decided to make its long distance phone service free because it cost more to charge the students than what they were actually using in the first place. The access points are already in place after all.
If wireless access points become ubiquitous in residences, how plausible is it that internet access will become free? Scenario: If someone was in a home without wired internet access, the packet exchanges would just "jump" via a wireless access point on it's way toward a free internet on ramp (provided by some do-gooder company), hopping from access point to access point as required to get to the "on ramp". Could this be made to work?
Cool - I guess airport is where one find all the cheap software geeks hangout (just for free WIFI access). Either that or the airport is a great place to upload/download/trade your hip music.
The second posting to this article nailed with the realization that the WiFi is paid for by the drinks and food consumed by hanging in the location longer. Airports and other public locations want you to come early and stay late to buy more from the retailers at the space. It's the retailers that will pay for the service to give it away for free.
TANSTAAFL= There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. And there ain't no free WiFi. Would you like another cup, or pint, or sandwich?
I've been running into the same problem for years -- and I finally remembered to pick up a cheap partial solution: I now carry a standard grounded three-way outlet ($2 at my local hardware store.)
So far, I've been warmly welcomed into two "power clusters" . . . particularly by the folks waiting to plug in!
1: Buy multi-tap outlet
2: Take flight with four-hour layover
3: Profit!
FIRST POST!!!!!1111111!!!!111111!
I used to carry a sweet little 3-outlet switched power strip. It came in handy for hotels where there wasn't enough outlets for the laptop, the cell charger, etc. It'd be great for this situations. Unfortunately it got left in a Chicago data center when we needed more power than we had outlets for and I've never replaced it.
How do airlines reclaim expenditures?
Ummmmm, how 'bout canceling a flight every day and still booking it?
That would be something innovative **
Apple could provide the wireless AP's for some publicity...using the Apple Airport at the Airport or something like that.