Cph Wifi — the good and the bad

When not at the office, I often (almost every day) pop out for a cof­fee (ok, actu­ally I pop out for cof­fees no mat­ter where I am or what I’m doing). It’s nice to get out dur­ing the day, and if I can get inter­net access I don’t even have to feel guilty of not work­ing — I can man­age most of my busi­ness from the com­fort of a cafe table, fresh cof­fee being served in a steady flow.

So as often before I found myself at Eugene this after­noon. I have a few cafes closer to my home that offer access as well, but Eugene gen­er­ally has more room and a more suit­able noise level for my lik­ing. Today some­thing bad hap­pened, though. I couldn’t get online and after check­ing this and that, a HotspotLive AP quickly emerged just to dis­ap­pear again. Which was about the same time I noticed the two guys in the cor­ner equipped with lad­ders, lap­tops and var­i­ous power tools. The nice lady behind the bar con­firmed, that they were “get­ting HotspotLive installed” and asked if I didnt think that was ok. Hon­est as I am, I answered that in my book, this wasn’t exactly the coolest move ever, but know­ing she couldn’t do any­thing any­way, I returned to my seat.

This is where the good thing hap­pens. I check for other APs and find one, inge­niously named as a cell­phone num­ber. A text mes­sage and two min­utes later things are start­ing to look bet­ter. This is roughly how the con­ver­sa­tion went:

Me: “Hi, I’m stuck at Eugene with wifi-trouble. Can I bor­row your con­nec­tion? Best regards /Anders — pollas.dk“
AP-guy: “I’m just return­ing home, I’m there in 5 min­utes if you’re still there“
Me: “Sounds per­fect!“
AP-guy: “I’ll be there in two, I’ll be the guy in the white jacket with a com­puter store car­rier bag”.

Friendly guy comes in, remem­bers his AP actu­ally is open already and gives me the WEP-key. He’s block­ing access tomor­row any­way, which is why I dare to post this bit — I hope it’s ok. Infor­ma­tion and access want to be free, but AP own­ers are to be respected.

Unfor­tu­nately the sig­nal proved not to be strong enough for a steady con­nec­tion, but that’s not really the point. The point is, that I can’t really under­stand why cafe own­ers are tempted by the HotspotLive solu­tion — espe­cially if they’re oper­at­ing their own AP already. As far as I can tell from their part­ner pages, the only thing they offer is the con­nec­tion itself. So if the cafes aren’t get­ting a cut of the money we are intented to pay each month, then why bother hav­ing two guys strapped with cables and power drills make a mess for four hours? Just to scare off poten­tial customers…

You see, the cof­fee isn’t that bleed­ing good. And the wire­less ISP idea has a few down­sides: I defi­nately don’t mind pay­ing for ser­vices in gen­eral, but in order to get the close-to-reasonable price (the monthly sub­scrip­tion), I’m rely­ing on a monop­oly. Can’t be done any other way — I’m not

going to pay more than one com­pany for this. And I don’t like monop­o­lies. And by the way: This is not an ordi­nary ser­vice, it’s a ser­vice meant to keep me longer in the cafe, get­ting me to buy more. Just like the news­pa­pers and mags. Would you sub­scribe to a ser­vice in order to have access to news­pa­pers in var­i­ous cafes? Thought not. If I don’t go for the sub­scrip­tion deal, then I need my credit card at hand, ready to be charged more than the cost of a cof­fee for just one hour’s access. So if I can get the access some­where for free, I sort of get my cof­fee for free…

But I’m ram­bling. The thing is, if we don’t down­right refuse to sub­scribe to these deals, I can under­stand why cafe own­ers get­ting offered a man­aged solu­tion is tempted to go with it. I’ll try to do my bit by try­ing to get to talk to the var­i­ous own­ers, but how do we spread the mes­sage? I would go for the “It’s just a ser­vice — it’s cheap too”-approach I think, but couldn’t you say, that at most of the places where cafes etc. are located, the pres­ence of a free AP is rather likely?

Input on this will be higly apprea­ci­ated. What to think, how to turn it around. What do you fuys think? I’m not even sure it’s the “free” aspect that mat­ters. If I got bet­ter secu­rity, var­i­ous fea­tures or what­ever, then I could see what it was about. For now, it’s just a mat­ter of how to dou­ble the cost of a trip to the cafe…