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“Free” wifi often comes with many conditions attached
By Will Goodbody, Science & Technology Correspondent
I don’t like to rant – well actually I do. But there are few things that get me more exercised than free public wifi.
You know the story. You arrive in a cafe, airport, hotel, conference centre.
The sign on the wall says there is free wifi available and because you are looking to increase your speed online and decrease your mobile data usage, you decide to use it.
You are given, or are pointed towards, a network, username and password.
First you have to find the right network from the list – usually relatively straightforward, unless there are multiple to choose from.
Next comes the tedious task of typing in convoluted credentials to allow you to connect.
You double click or tap on the right network and then wait to see if the settings box where you must enter the details pops open automatically.
When it inevitably doesn’t, you try opening a web browser in the hope that it brings you to a webpage where you can type the correct information.
After waiting an age for it to load, you are finally greeted with a pointless tome of terms and conditions of use, which nobody ever reads.
You tick the box to say you agree to them, which prompts another page to open where you are asked for personal information, like your name, age, company, email address, phone number, shoe size, etc.
A completely pointless exercise given that you can usually enter random information which bears no resemblance to your own personal details without consequence, and when there is usually a box you can tick or untick to ensure the provider can’t send you spam anyway.
Anyway, five minutes later, once 93 year old Joe Bloggs from Afghanistan (joe_bloggs1234@thisi snotemail.com) has completed the tedious form, you are finally asked for that username and password.
And after getting the messy mixture of upper and lower case, numeric and alphabetic characters, symbols and emoticons right, you eventually get online – just as your blood pressure tops the gauge.
You work away happily and productively, sending those emails, checking the latest news and updating your social media accounts, until suddenly it all unexpectedly grinds to a halt.
After scratching your head for a while, you try to refresh a webpage again in the vain hope that your connection has miraculously returned.
Only to discover that for no apparent reason you have been booted off the network and must re-enter that username and password AGAIN.
Or worse still, that the free wifi service is limited to 30 minutes and to continue using it you have to pay a hefty fee.
And that’s all before you even begin to consider the potential security risks posed by sharing a wifi network with complete strangers.
Or that the wifi network you are using is not actually being run by the people you think it is, and instead has unbeknownst to you been set up by an opportunistic hacker sitting at the table next to you, remotely monitoring everything you are doing.
The widespread availability of open free internet access is vitally important. Mark Zuckerberg has even described it as a human right.
So is it really so hard to get public wifi right? Is it really impossible to make it both open and secure at the same time? Is there no better way to deliver it?
Of course you can argue that if you want to get online while away from home or the office, you should use your own mobile data connection. But that misses the point.
While abroad, for example, many of us don’t want to use mobile data roaming, because of the unjustifiable and crippling charges that many operators impose.
Plus, free public wifi is a service.
Sure it comes at a cost to the provider. But if a cafe, airport, hotel etc is going to offer it in the first place, surely it is in their interests to ensure that the standard of user experience matches the other services they offer their customers.
Why oh why must free public wifi be like this?
Comments welcome via Twitter to @willgoodbody