You pay large sums of money to airlines to wait in an airport for hours to sit on a plane that is too small next to someone that is too big (the irony about that statement is that *I* am usually that person). Then once you’re on the plane you have to pay $2 for a can – a 12 oz can – of warm soda. To top it all off you have to pay $8 for internet access while you wait?! Come on, Commercialism!
It costs a small airport *maybe* $500 to set up a system that would allow any number of people to connect to the internet. I’ll be generous and say that, for example, Richmond spent $5000 on a network that would allow its patrons to be wired. Richmond is one of the few airports I’ve been in that offers free wifi, I might add. You’d think the small airports would be the ones to charge. But no, it’s the large ones. La Guardia, JFK, Atlanta, they all charge you. In addition to charging, they don’t even use the same system to connect. At La Guardia it’s the Boingo network, JFK is T-Mobile. At least Atlanta has several options to choose from.
Your minimum cost is $5 an hour. On Boingo, you can get a day for $8. The only problem is I don’t know how to set it up for a day. I bought an hour the first time (oh, you also have to install software that starts automatically and *doesn’t* have a quit button), but now I want to buy a day because I’m in Atlanta for a while, only I can’t figure out how to upgrade. I’m afraid if I spend slightly more than an hour, it’ll charge me for two.
Of course, the easy way to avoid this is to get an air card that I can connect to my cell phone bill. If I want to spend over $100 a month, that is.
Look around you. Do you see all that air? Looks free enough, right? Then why is it so expensive to use?!
-j
I'm Jason, and I like to write.