The Daily Ping

I confess I’m not sure of the vast implications of installing airport-wide wi-fi. But my experiences at Chicago-Midway and Denver International Airport weren’t really great and it made me think that maybe no one really cares once the contract is signed.

I’ll start with Denver: the connection quality was generally very spotty. I was able to connect to the network fine but I wasn’t able to browse reliably; pages would simply not get rendered or requests would go into the ether. The very positive thing I won’t deny is that wi-fi at DIA is free after you watch a 30-second ad. The other tradeoff is that there’s an obtrusive iframe stuck to the top of every web page which includes links to the airport’s site, the concourse maps, and a Google search box (hi, affiliate bucks!) Not horrible for free, but could be better.

Midway’s was much worse. I’m not sure why Chicago has a hard time with airport-related tech; their official site still sucks hard and so does the wi-fi. The first caveat is that it’s not free. It’s operated by Boingo and costs… well, I don’t know how much it costs because the login page was broken all day when I wanted to use it. The problem was that the domain boingo.aero (first and only .aero I’ve seen in the wild) was offline. I called their customer service and was told that their techs were “working on it.” That’s great. In the meantime there was no error message, no nothing but a broken JavaScript redirect on a login page.

But the customer support person I spoke with did ask if I wanted to sign up for service. Great timing.

For business people having a connection is imperative, and I guess that’s why 3G and EDGE USB network sticks are popular. But for those of us who don’t want to pony up the bucks it’s a disappointing and unnerving experience. I mean, we were able to coordinate the security theater that is the TSA in short order but we can’t do free national airport wi-fi? Ooookay.

Posted in Technology