O'Hare WiFi Hot Spots Not So Hot
Earlier this year, Chicago's O'Hare Airport was ranked dead last in on-time departures for the first half of 2006. Now adding to its woes, according to Jon Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune's "Getting Around" column (registration required), the airport's WiFi service seems to be lacking as well. Hilkevitch reports that passengers have been complaining about not being able to connect to the wireless network, or if they do, the system becomes quickly overloaded and they are soon dropped. The interesting thing is that O'Hare's one big problem fuels the other -- the more people sitting around the terminal waiting on their delayed flights, the more people jumping onto their laptops and the wireless network. So it seems O'Hare has an opportunity here to kill two birds with one stone...
The kicker to this story is that unlike most other major airports, a user of O'Hare's crummy wireless network gets to pay for the privilege -- $6.95 for one day's access. I think I'll follow the advice of city aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams to just go ahead and use one of the alternate subscription WISPs available instead (currently AT&T/SBC Freedomlink, Boingo, GoRemote, iBAHN/STSN, iPass, Orange France, Sprint, T-Mobile and WeRoam).
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