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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
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.
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
Imagine that... An ISP employee looking for internet access at work...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
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!
I've spent enough time waiting at gates to appreciate the utility of having wireless internet there. It's not that I need to get something out while at the gate, but that I have an hour or more (I like to get there early...) to get something productive done while I wait.
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
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?
I've used a dial up line near the gate to sync my email so that I could keep working on the plane. Wireless access would simply make this easier. In addition, many Wireless systems I've used try to "force" the windows browser to a specific start page, which may be leveraged as an advertisement for shops that are local to the Access Point.
Hmmm.. new business advertising model? Setup free WIFI, but hijack the initial page to a custom advertisement for the business hosting the hotspot?
I could write something witty for my sig, but instead wrote this...
You've apparently never travelled on business. There's times that you have to go straight from the airport to the customer site, and you're far more likely to have WiFi available at a hub airport than a spoke airport. As such, it can be quite useful to be able to connect to the corporate VPN and download email with updated status at the customer site in the 15 minutes available at the gate.
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'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 library is a public place. Anyone can use it for whatever means.
What one can do to abuse wifi is pretty well known. It appears they think the risk is worth it. Why let a few bad apples ruin it for all?
If the admin is capable and has a minimal budget, he can alleviate a lot. Bandwidth shaping (let it burst at first, but after so much data throttle it back). I guess one could filter known attacks.
Also people are actively working on these problems. Check this out.
Roland van Laar has a new, significant wi-fi patch for FreeBSD 5.1 and higher. The patch, available for download and testing, blocks clients with an empty or 'ANY' ssid and disables ssid broadcasting using the underlying firmware feature. SSID (Service Set ID) is used to identify wireless clients to a wireless / wired gateway.
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
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.
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.
Yea, because so many more perverts like to go to places like highly monitored government buildings crawling with security people and checkpoints and other people and cameras that can see their screens than, say, just drive around the 'burbs in the privacy of their cars looking for an open access point.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
to be honest, i get a lot of work done in airports. It also keeps me connected (i know i know, its cliche, but true) At the narita airport in tokyo japan, after spending hours upon hours of mind numbing hours on a plane form the states, there was nothing more that i wanted to do than to track down somewhere to plug in and get to my email/regular sites/etc. turns out i was there for 14+ hours. i paid for the wireless connect so i could keep myself sane. that might be a valid use: maintiaining sanity. Narita has an amazing lounge which is accessable for all airlines with well lit desks, comfy chairs and a juice bar. the wireless (which was relatively cheap, at that) plus the lounge made me all the more inclined to request my return trip be connected through Narita. I believe that mindset/ market is what PIT is attempting to appeal to as well.
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)
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
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.
They don't have to look at it to get it.
According to the DoJ report that was released a while back (I don't have the URL), they claim that 42% of all P2P pornography is kiddy porn.
Believing that number to be true (I think its high, but whatever) you could set up KaZaa to download lots of porn on the public network to your laptop and look at it when you get home. Noone would be the wiser.
The other implication to this is the RIAA.
"Uh, PIT. We need you to give us the names of all the people that used your network to download Britney Spears songs."
We'll probably see some ridiculous figure like, "RIAA's Profits Dropped 2000% Since PIT Opened WIFI Hotspot."
-Eric
hrrm.
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
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
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.
Another fine example of how Plug-N-Play works to make life easy! somehow I think Plug-N-Play is not named correctly. It should be load driver software-Plug-Pray-Reboot-Pray-Configure-Play.
The truth shall set you free!
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...
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.
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
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.
Jed Blue gives free wifi access in certain airports, specificity JFK and I think Long Beach.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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