Google Gives the Gift of Free Airport Wi-Fi 158
itwbennett writes "Google is giving you something to be thankful for as you travel this holiday season. The company announced today that it is offering free Wi-Fi at 47 airports across the US between now and January 15. If you haven't booked your flights yet, you want to factor this into your plans. Here's a list of the 47 airports, which cover about 35% of all US passengers, according to Google. The Burbank and Seattle airports will continue to offer the free Google Wi-Fi indefinitely." The HuffPo notes another altruistic note in Google's gesture: "As another way to pass on the spirit of the season, once they log on to networks in any of the participating airports, travelers will have the option [of making] a donation to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation, or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google will match the donations made across all the networks up to $250,000, and the airport network that generates the highest amount per passenger by January 1, 2010 will receive $15,000 to donate to the local nonprofit of their choice."
Why is this news (Score:2, Insightful)
I was just in the Incheon airport and not only do they have free wifi throughout the terminal, but many internet PCs freely available for anyone to use. I guess the real news here is that someone passed up on an opportunity to charge $2/hr or whatever for wifi in this country.
Re:PDX not on the list (Score:1, Insightful)
Because they want to charge for it and make money from the service, duh.
To "the season" (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck the season
Fuck the horse (or "raindear") it rode in on.
And fuck the "spirit" of whatever the hell makes you feel all twingly inside and more "giving"
You are either a good person or an asshole, regardless of the time of the year.
Re:Yay SJC! Too bad for SFO (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a nice gesture of goodwill from Google... I wonder how much it costs.
Goodwill? Well maybe, but I suspect that they'll also be storing all that lovely user data about people's surfing habits. Airports have a lot of different passengers going through each day, so they'd get a good cross-section of the population. Also, as network traffic on airport wifis is predominantly from personal laptops, perhaps there will be less clickbots/spambots to screw up Google's statistics. They could also tailor their advertisements more effectively, showing people ads for local businesses in and around the airport, for example.
Re:Yay SJC! Too bad for SFO (Score:1, Insightful)
As if Google doesn't have enough user data already. It's for "goodwill" in the sense that it's good advertising for them.
Train stations (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Copying MS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, this is next to useless because it doesn't cover any of the airports you are likely to be flying through. None of the major airline hub cities except Las Vegas and Miami are included on the list. Not DFW, not Atlanta, not Denver, not LAX, not Salt Lake City, not Cincinnati, not Chicago, not JFK.
Unless you're a complete fool, you probably have a pretty good idea how early to get to the airport to fly, and for most of us, that means printing your boarding pass from home before you leave, and arriving an hour before the plane leaves. That gives you thirty minutes through security, ten minutes in the airport, and then you're gone. There's very little time to use Wi-Fi, though I suppose if my plane were delayed out of San Jose due to maintenance problems, it might be marginally useful.
Similarly, when you get to your destination, Wi-Fi is the last thing you're thinking about. You're making a beeline for the luggage conveyor (if you checked any), then a beeline for the taxi stand or the pickup area or the car rental place. So although it's nice in theory that I could get free Wi-Fi when I get to Nashville, the fact of the matter is that I won't use it there, either, nor on my return trip.
The one part of your trip that you're not in control over---the one part of your trip where you actually spend a significant amount of time sitting in the airport twiddling your thumbs---is that three or four hour layover. Statistically speaking, this is almost always going to be in Dallas/Fort-Worth, Atlanta, Chicago, LAX, or Denver---maybe Las Vegas if you are flying from somewhere in the western U.S. to somewhere else in the western U.S., but even then, you're much more likely to go through LAX.
So it's a nice idea in principal, but in practice, you'd have a hard time picking worse airports in terms of improving things for U.S. passengers. The airports listed are almost never used for connections except maybe puddle jumper biplanes out to Lexington, KY or something. I mean, I guess they could have picked Jackson, TN (MKL), Milan's Linate Airport (LIN), and Air Europa (UX) or something, but....
The Reason Why? Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Portland, OR is not on the list...but then that's probably because travelers through PDX already enjoy free wi-fi courtesy of the Port of Portland and have for several years now. Now tell me again why other airports don't extend this courtesy already?
As someone that works at an airport (and provides free Wi-Fi), I'll tell you precisely why more don't offer it: money. I work at a smaller airport where the cost of providing the service is low, but at larger airports, the cost of bandwidth and hardware is significant. Pittsburgh and McCarran in Las Vegas offered it as an incentive to pull in fliers, but the cost issue is a double edged sword at airports. With the state of the air travel industry being so bad, not only do airports not want to foot the bill for Wi-Fi, many of them don't want to give up the revenue from the paid Wi-Fi services some have. Airports are pretty desperate for money right now, and there's very little they can do to make it outside of rents and fees. It's not like they can throw an airline ticket sale to attract more fliers. That's up to the airlines. Airports are nothing but landlords, and they're completely dependent upon rent from tenants and fees from things like baggage carts and yes, Wi-Fi.
Re:To "the season" (Score:5, Insightful)
You are either a good person or an asshole, regardless of the time of the year.
So good of you to represent the assholes.
Re:heh (Score:4, Insightful)
If a plane can be brought down by a weak 2.4Ghz transmission, we have other *much* more serious issues to consider.
The planes should be tested against the most powerful transmission equipment that somebody could possibly smuggle on board the aircraft, not the other way around. RF shielding isn't exactly rocket science, and one would hope that any critical circuitry would already be shielded, given the crazy electromagnetic stuff that happens in the upper atmosphere where the planes happen to spend most of their time.