Mannerisms

Paranoia corner

Has anyone else come across the phenomenon that, where there’s a paid WiFi connection, the free connections don’t work?

Going through San Jose airport in October, there were about half a dozen network providers, one of which was free. I connected to all the others in turn but was unable to get onto the Web.

Connect up to the paid network and, hey presto, I was able to access anything I wanted..

I’ve noticed the same phenomenon at Munich and other European airports. There are some free networks, you can connect to them, but they don’t then connect you to the Web. Have the pay-for guys somehow managed to scupper the free networks?

The situation is quite different at some airports like the Phoenix Skyport and Budapest where free WiFi is ubiquitous and, as soon as you switch on your laptop, the connected signal is blinking away.

The great hope for WiFi was that it would become the ‘Peoples’ Telephony’ with local authorities, libraries, airports, museums, publicly-minded commercial corporations, hotels, bookshops, cafes etc etc providing the service for free.

Pity if it gets wrapped up into a cellular add-on service.