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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?
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.
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
they are going to pay for it by not providing soap and not cleaning the toilets twice a month? :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.