Wi-Fi zone tales of woe flood in

CAST YOUR MIND BACK to last Friday when the weather in London's red and tranquil labyrinth was hotter than July.

Sales guys loosened ties and slung jackets over shoulders while slurping thirstily from pints of lager top outside pubs decorated by pansies that drooped and shed petals. The sales boys' molls stood by them clutching lurid cocktails as their arms turned from chalk and puce to pinky-red and you could almost hear the skin sizzle.

It was very heaven to be alive but your correspondent was more hot under the collar than in possession of a sunny disposition. Today's it's a little cooler but, just like Peter Finch in Network, he's still mad as hell with the state of public Wi-Fi. But he's not a man to be beaten down by the big bullies of government, corporate telecoms and the hotel and catering trade, and he's fortified by the support of readers of The INQUIRER, possibly the greatest collection of articulate, passionate, intelligent people ever to cleave to a publication.

Thousands of you - that's right I said tens of you - wrote in to say, "Hey, Marty, you're a great bloke and you're right — and it's just as bad here". So what are we gonna do, troops? We're gonna get us a mob together and stand on the gears of this corrupt machine until it stops stiffing us, that's what. Or at least, we can develop a campaign badge. Trust me, I'm working on it.

The Chappells wrote in from the Windy City to say:

"It sounds as if the London city fathers have adopted the Chicago model of city financing. O'Hare airport advertises its Wi-Fi network profusely, but when one goes to log on one discovers that it is not a service to visitors passing through the city but another form of toll—read tax—of the people who do not even live there. And speaking of tolls, a person does not even have to be staying in Chicago to be ripped off by the city's strategy. Because they are situated on a bottle neck at the southern point of Lake Michigan, where anyone wishing to proceed from east to west, or vice versa, must pass, they take advantage of that by charging everyone who even drives by their city on the way to somewhere else. It resembles the old medieval model of a city located on a river which would draw a large chain across the stream and charge all boats passing by a fee. I am this very day starting my own personal campaign entitled ‘Boycott Chicago'. To the barricades, everyone!"

Yup, Chicago, hell of a town, as someone once sang. By the way, I visited once and camped out at a great bar, the Billy Goat Tavern. Try it if you're there.

B dropped us a line too.

"Prior to getting my laptop all this Wi-Fi stuff sounded awesome. News story upon news story of "public access" Wi-Fi. Great. Bring your Visa. And so, there I am at the airport with hours to kill after the latest terror scare, logging on to the Wi-Fi. But wait, what's this? How much? You're joking. Instead I played Monkey Island, offline. And when I finally my plane boarded, I left the Wi-Fi on, and the cellphone too. Be damned, if that's what they think its worth I'll take this whole plane with me to my doom. Innocents and all. But do you think the plane crashed? No it didn't. Lies. Damned Lies. Now, time to get my Phrack on, or 2600, and break their damn encryption and firewalls to a pulp, free Wi-Fi for all. ALL! Ya hea'?"

Steady on there, B, your revolutionary fervour is kinda fanatical.

Sean Baggaley, a wise man, knows the truth when he sees it: "I agree 1000%. And no, my experiences in Italy, Germany and France have not been any better, although €5.00 is still less than £5.00."

So what you mean is that they are better…

"That said, I feel you're being a little unfair on Mayor Ken when you write, 'Mayor Ken, you already stiff visitors arriving by air by pretending our airports are in London and then stiff them again with rip-off trains.' Ken Livingstone had nowt to do with either, although in fairness to London, at least both Heathrow and London City are inside the M25. Neither of Rome's two airports can claim to be inside Rome's equivalent: the Grande Raccordo Annulare. The GLA has no control over BAA's monopolistic shenanigans. Ken's more the 'build a TGV network in the UK to replace national flights' type, I suspect."

Abraxalito was next to join in with tales of Wi-Fi around the world: "Enjoyed your article. I've been living in China where everywhere I have found Wi-Fi to be free. Nowhere have I had to pay or even ask for a password. Not only that but also in hotels, a wired connection to the net is also free. Then when I come back to UK, getting online is relatively a pain. At Heathrow airport, I tried to use one of those internet terminals, but it was completely useless. I took my laptop to Borders bookshop in Cambridge — there was a sign saying I needed to ask a member of staff to get online. I couldn't be bothered. I visited a new tea-shop in Cambridge, again I needed to ask for the password. I try with the password I'm given, but to no avail. I wish you well, but its a mindset you've got to change, since its not just about Wi-Fi."

So true, we're just too damned meek.

Julian said: "When I was in Italy they wanted me to pay 10 euros an hour to use a computer and internet!!! First chance I got I rebooted the computer and launched Firefox from a USB drive and avoided the crappy password system."

Gabor wrote: "Agree completely. I want flat-rate Wi-Fi from T-Mobile that works all over the world for 10 quid a month. From San Diego airport all the way to Budapest, across the world, at every Starbucks, everywhere. Bad enough to have to have three T-Mobile SIM cards (US, UK, Hungary) due to the astonishing roaming charges ON THEIR OWN (expletive) NETWORK. Greedy bastards, along with all the others..."

Gldm wrote with more horror from the land of the springbok: "Try coming down to South Africa sometime, where it's a mere £175 per month for a 4Mbps DSL line, which drops every time it rains or the dog sneezes. Oh and that doesn't include bandwidth, which is £7 per GB. Not that you'll be able to download much since it's traffic-shaped to hell so only http gets decent speeds. They seem to think nobody notices when http gets 100-400KB/sec downloads and FTP gets 10-20, unless you use a multipart transfer and then magically there's another 200KB bandwidth hiding somewhere. Static IP? What's that? Unshaped acount? Sure, just double both line and bandwidth costs and it's still slow internationally. The MPAA doesn't need to worry about people downloading movies here, if you want to pirate it costs less to just buy the pirate burned version of it sold at every red light you stop at. Or even just buy the legal DVD when you figure you can get them for less than the price of a gig of data when they're on sale. Why is it so expensive? Good question. It might have something to do with the monopoly telecom provider, who stopped being a government-sanctioned monopoly, and yet still has no competition (the attempts to start up other network providers have met with mysterious red tape) and is still mostly owned by shareholders in government positions. The telecoms regulator occasionally threatens things like making them stop charging line fees (only country in the world where you pay your ISP and then pay the telecom provider a separate, even larger fee, for a line that costs 1/10th that if you use it to talk on). But this usually results in absolutely nothing but moaning and whining about how expensive the infrastructure is and how the world will end if the line fees are gone. Which sounds real plausible when you're making billions net profit with a double digit percent increase per year and you only have about 100K DSL users that can't even amount to 1% of your international fibre's bandwidth capacity. The alternatives are a 1M wireless to router system that's cheaper base cost per month but more expensive on bandwidth, and doesn't work in a lot of places, and 3G, which you don't even want to know the pricing of. So yeah, £5 Wi-Fi. I wish."

Igor was quick off the mark, hitting the Compose Email button faster than a fast man doing a thing he always did quickly anyway faster than usual: "In Serbia I pay £20 a month for mere 512Kbps ADSL flat rate. Should I mention that you can get 8Mbps for £15 in London? And what about GPRS/EDGE/3G prices? We pay 44p per megabyte of transfer here for using the internet via a mobile phone. Don't even get me started on Wi-Fi prices. Now what was your problem all about?"

Fair point, Igor but just cause your rubbish in Serbia - a beautiful country, by the way - stinks worse than the rubbish here doesn't mean that we shouldn't clear up our rubbish. If you catch my drift.

Jeffkane wrote in to bash those of us who live in the strange continent with the circle of stars on the blue flag. "Europe and the UK," he wrote, "are all metered,metered,metered. Blame it on the culture instilled by metered landline service. They can get away with it, so they do! Look at what you pay for wireless voice per minute vs. Asia, NoAm, etc. In the insult to injury dept... Spend £8,000 on a return first ticket to the ‘states, relax in a BA lounge. Internet options? CrapCloud and t-mo. It's pathetic!”

I'm impressed with your £8K ticket, Sir.

Vszulc wrote: "Here's my wifi-horror story. 7-11 in Denmark decided to offer its customers wifi for about 5 quid an hour. I signed up for it one time I was desperate for access, used about half an hour, and forgot all about it. Until two weeks later, when I submitted a story to a magazine (freelancer), and the editor decided he needed a new draft. The connection at home was down, so I found myself one Thursday at midnight standing in a 7-11, trying to connect to my Gmail. One of the staff asked me to leave the store, (Must have thought I'm half crazy, standing over the freezer with a laptop), and when I explained that I was using the Wifi they're offering their customers, she seemed completely oblivious, and wasn't even sure what wifi is. In comes the night-manager, and the minute he hears that I'm using their network to get on the internet, he panics, physically tries to remove from the store and threatens to call the police. That's 7-11 convience for ya... Arise white-collar workers of the world!”

Jeez, did you at least get your microwaved burger?

David Shaw wrote: "Correct article Martin! When I go on mission (= business trip in EU speak) I spend as much time as possible pre-trip ensuring that my hotel has free WiFi. This is the make and break between choosing from the hundreds of hostels available in Brussels or Paris. On my last visit to rural Brittany to a secret communications base, the hotel didn't have free internet - but I accidentally discovered that a firewalled MacBook Pro with OS X 10.4 when plugged into the (€5/hr wired) ethernet would Video Skype and POP to an https webmail site to its heart's content. Isn't it a pity that some hotel chains can't spot an OS X user! As for PayFi_Wifi that plagues airports, it's just not worth the money in order to be attacked by the queue of virii/worm/exploits that are allegedly running on these overpriced points of presence. Convergence is coming however, and one will need Fring everywhere when the iPhone/N-series get affordable and we can switch-off 2.5 and 3G. There must come a lower priced WiFi or enhanced-service-paid free WiFi as use in five yrs could be very high , given a ‘FREE' free market."

Seacliff House added this: "Travel Inn Wi-Fi provided by Swisscom -- ½ hour, £3, one hour £5, one day £20, monthly pass £169. At 802.11b speed with shocking quality? This is criminal..."

Alan was another Swisscom critic: "I completely agree with you on the high prices of WiFi access. I spend quite a bit of time in Premier Travel Inns.."

What, like Alan Partridge?

"… most of which have WiFi in the rooms now. The ones run by wifizone (Spectrum Internet) are kind-of reasonable at £24 for the week, but others are run by SwissCom and want £84 for a week and limit the amount of data you can transfer. Even if I can only get GPRS, I will use my cellular data card in preference to SwissCom's rip off, but my old Option 3G card used to chuck me off regularly so I'd pay wifizone's prices. I now have an Sierra Wireless 875 HSDPA card on T-Mobile's Web-And-Walk that's much more stable, so I don't use the wifi at all if I can get 3G.

However, some readers told us about how great things were where they live, including saxsux: "Hi, I feel so sorry for you. Living in Norwich, where we have the largest free Wi-Fi network in the country, and you tend to forget how hard it is for the less privileged people around the world. Good luck fighting Wi-Fi your charges! "

And INQ contributor Fernando Cassia bragged: "We have free Wi-Fi on the tube down here in Buenos Aires. I know travelling to South America and living on the tube is not the best of solutions, but it's the first that comes to mind. ;-)"

Cheers Fernando, I'm waiting for EasyJet to move in on that route.

Haydencohen added: "Read your article and just thought you'd like to know that there was free wireless with a free broadband connection point in my hotel room and easy-to-connect wireless on my recent holiday in Tel Aviv. It's how the UK should do it. Absolutely fantastic."

That's so true. If they give you this stuff for free they buy your loyalty and you don't even mind the tenner for a large VAT from the minibar.

Gus writes in: "In America, the streets are paved with gold, and the wifi, just like every public restroom, is free."

Yeah, but do you have to tip the guy who gives you a towel a dollar? What's with that, America?

Dg44 recommends that old stratagem of going down the pub: "The Two Sawers pub in Ivy lane, Canterbury has had free WiFi for three years now. The landlord even keeps setup CD-ROM's behind the bar. That makes £5 an hour look very bad."

And the garden of England is great this time of year. Pity I don't like Shepherd Neame. By the way, Sussex are trouncing your cricket team.

Bren writes in with another holiday postcard: "Just spent the easter weekend in Vegas. Their Monorail system has free Wifi at each station (you can see that each has multiple access points installed as they are visible) courtesy of Cisco/Linksys. May seem a little odd sitting at a station after dark, but it is free! Also as these stations are fairly much open and high up I'm sure the signal would probably stretch to the nearby hotels and open pool areas as at the MGM. The MGM Grand had wired internet access in the rooms but didn't check to see how much they wanted to charge. I really cannot fathom how hotels can still feel that charging for Internet access can be justified anymore. Not all guests use it and I would much rather stay (and recommend) hotels that provide it free - like TV and hot water!! Keep on plugging for free WiFi!"

Rclarke is our second correspondent from the Chi-town. "I live in Chicago and have Cingular wireless broadband for $56 a month. It works anywhere a Cingular cellphone does. It's about 384kbp/sec I have FTP'd 10mb files while on a train moving at 60mph. In fact I'm sending this from the train. Don't they have a similar thing in the UK? I thought the US was behind Europe in such things."

Well, it's free Wi-Fi in GNER trains' first-class section but that's a pricey ticket.

Aurizon says: "Canada has unmetered phone and internet use and we have a mixture of free wifi and paid wifi in various places. The entire downtown is a free wifi zone hosted by the electric company who own pole access all over. They simply put if fiber and wireless hubs and they have given free use (for now)."

Matt adds a one-word suggestion: "Fon!?"

Yeah, but it's not quite there. We want to get this Wi-Fi sorted so keep those stories coming in. Together we can change this bleak situation. µ