I’m on holiday, and the holiday park where we’re staying has free wifi in their restaurant area, which is unfortunately not very reliable. Initially I was very annoyed about this – if you’re going to do something (and advertise it on your website), do it properly otherwise it’s just going to get up customers’ noses.
However, looking around last night, just about every person between the age of 14 and 40 had a smartphone in front of them, no doubt all connected to some poor mid-level wifi system that was never designed to be a carrier quality provider for a hundred or more subscribers. I wonder how many they estimated when they put it in – counting tables and assuming one laptop per table on average I reckon 20 max, so maybe not building in 5x or 10x redundancy is forgivable.
I remember reading somewhere recently that the average household has more than one mobile phone per adult, although of course with the available wifi my chances of finding the article before drop kicking my laptop in frustration is too small to risk. Suffice to say even a reasonable proportion of those phones being “smart” must be a scary statistic for small wifi providers; just in my two-adult family we have six active phones (not including the several holdovers each from old contracts), of which four are smart to varying degrees. This may seem ridiculous, but consider one each in two countries, a work Blackberry and a spare for visitors and it soon adds up.
Of course I could tether to my phone, but I’m in Europe and out of my home country, so ten days tethered roaming would likely lead to a bill larger than the cost of the holiday; if I’d thought ahead I could have picked up local USB 3G dongle, but then I was expecting wifi…
What is unforgivable in my view is that I’m typing this in notepad because they have a firewall in place that blocks my blog editor. I can’t imagine the blog admin page has much to offend a firewall, and my webmail is fine attachments and all, so the real security holes are still nice and open… Why do access point providers do this? It’s not even a check for inappropriate content, which you could perhaps argue is valid at a holiday camp, but “security risk” which I know for a fact it isn’t since I put the content there. Why would the firewall be any better at spotting this than my up-to-date virus software, and more to the point it’s a public wifi – some of the systems attached are bound to already be infected with something and the firewall isn’t going to help a bit with that.
Oh well, it’s annoying but I’m on holiday so spending a couple of hours getting round it is likely to get me in trouble with the family, notepad will do for now.