This backwards nation

So I was sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport trying to log on to the internet to check my email and the like, and what with LHR being a major international airport with millions of travellers passing through each day, one might expect some free wifi.

But no. This money grabbing backwards nation can’t even get that organised. £1 for 10 minutes!?!?!? You are having a giraffe my friend!

So now I’m at Hong Kong, waiting in the departure lounge to catch my next flight on to Auckland, and thankfully they have managed to grasp the concept of free wifi. Granted, its unsecured and the connection rate doesn’t seem to be brilliant, but it is free and is enough for me to write this and check my mail quickly. I’ll see what there is in Auckland in due course.

So the question is, how much does it really cost a big telco (for example BT) to provide free wifi? There’s probably a lot of hardware to install and run, but it shouldn’t need a massive team of engineers to support it, and given there is already an extensive payphone network in the terminals connectivity to the main trunk networks shouldn’t be a problem either. One day……. I can but hope

Rant over.

Si