Dear Traveling Venues of the World – airports, hotels, hostels, car rental offices, buses, international terminals, hotels, airlines, airplanes:
Be forewarned. Yes, be forewarned. We, the travelers of the nation, are sick and tired of not having functional wifi on the road, and we will not put up with it forever.
While more and more venues are slowly implementing wifi solutions (Delta, Airtran and VirginAirlines are offering free in-flight wifi sponsored by Google’s Chrome browser during the holiday season), the roll out is both too slow, too restricted, and often too expensive and inconsistent. Before everyone and their pre-teen had a smartphone; before people brought a laptop and an iPad with them everywhere; and before email became like breathing, not having wifi in certain areas was acceptable.
No more.
Even in places where there is public wifi, it is often so slow and so over-accessed that it is fully non-functional. Broken wifi could possibly be used as a torturing device in modern times: you don’t know it’s broken, you have a false sense of hope, you continue hitting refresh or F5 over and over, becoming more and more tired and furious because you just want to finish uploading that one episode of Fry and Laurie for the plane ride before you board since you’ve already read the in-flight magazines for the month five times over and you’re just not interested in purchasing a slanket. Please work, wifi, please! But it doesn’t work and you board the flight only to snap at the stewardess for having run out of the cookie option. It’s not her fault. You just want free, fast wifi!
3G and smartphones will only get you so far, especially in while flying where 3G is banned. We need the travel industry to get a few things: we like having bathrooms, drinking fountains, a litter-free and smoke-free environment, and wifi. Are we spoiled? Sure, but we are also the credit-card wielding group that floats the world of travel, and so we should be able to dictate our terms. (Found this site that is campaigning for free wifi within tourism industries. Great, but we need it fast.)
We want free, fast and capable wifi everywhere, and we want it yesterday. Southwest is at long last rolling out wifi to their full fleet (more than 30 planes are currently equipped, although we never seem to actually manage to be scheduled on one), only a year behind the curve of technology. Even in Great Britain, their trains are offering wifi on board, apparently way ahead of Europe. Although some of these advancements are stepping up, it is unacceptable that it has taken so long. Thomas Edison invented a system of wireless telegraphy back in 1888 that was deployed on the Lehigh Valley Railroad, and Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the theory of electromagnetic waves during the same year. We are now 132 years in the future and wireless internet is hard to find. Can this be bureaucracy at its finest?
One last point: where wifi is thought hard to find, we will pay a fee for it. In the air? Hard. $5 for a short flight and $10 for a long trek is fair. On the ground? No. It should be there, every time, no questions asked.
We travel, and we want more. Universal wireless access will become the norm, it is just a matter of time. Let’s just hope it’s not too much longer.
