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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
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
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 ??
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.
You've obviously never sat for hours at "the gate" waiting for the late plane that will carry you to your next destination. The gate is where we all hope there is coffee and entertainment - and if you have a laptop with IP connectivity you can at least fake the entertainment ;)
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
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!
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.
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?
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 have to agree; this is a small disaster in the making.
This service will be used mostly by business travellers, who will more than likely be doing business-related activities, including pulling down email and shuttling documents back and forth. POP/IMAP passwords are transmitted in the clear, and can be trivially sniffed. Your file server credentials can also be fairly easily sniffed out, allowing someone else to connect as you and start pulling down documents.
Crypto needs to be standard in such environments, but it's clear that's not going to happen soon. WEP is worthless, and 802.1x isn't in wide deployment, which leaves VPN (kinda ugly and deployed ad hoc), SSH tunnels (better, but still unwieldy), and IPSec (even better, but not very common). So there's going to be a lot of sensitive data floating around in the clear.
If you're not using crypto, or not certain you're using crypto, change your passwords before and after you use a public 802.11 node.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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
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.