Airport WiFi Almost Ready for Primetime?

I travel a lot. Usually I'm on at least two to three flights in a 10-day period. That means I spend a lot of time in airports and, as a result, need to be using airport WiFi.

Some airports have so-called free WiFi. You can find that at San Diego Airport - Lindbergh Field, Denver International Airport, Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport and now even at Oakland International Airport. The user experience with free WiFi is as variable as the weather at San Francisco Airport. In fact, predicting the weather is probably easier than predicting what sort of service will be available on airport WiFi. Take for example my experience at Denver International. To log on, I was first required to watch an advertisement, but on my Mac Book Pro using the latest version of Firefox 3.x, the page wouldn't even load and I had to resort to using Safari.

Now let me compare this to my experiences at Starbucks, where the WiFi is powered by AT&T, an airport hotel or club that is powered by T-Mobile or one of the many airports where the WiFi is managed by Boingo (for the purposes of full disclosure, I must note here that Boingo is a client of my agency.

At any of those locations, I simply open up a browser, wait for the log-on page to appear and voila, my username and password are entered and I connect in seconds — not minutes like in Denver. Now in fairness to the San Diego Airport, my experience there has been nothing but great since they upgraded to better connectivity with fatter pipe and better transport. On the other hand, at Oakland — which recently went free via an ad -supported mode — the experience is less than as good as it was when it was paid.

These inconsistencies pose challenges to those of us who like to use Skype, SightSpeed or other voice or video applications that need consistent bandwidth, low latency and really good backhaul. They also need to be able to handle a crowd, which the free WiFi usually can't.

Airports that want to skimp on bandwidth and Internet management just don't understand the needs of the business traveler. And for road warriors, that's not what's good for us.

Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano, Inc., a boutique asymmetrical communications consultancy geared to providing senior advising, marketing and corporate communications and marketer-in-residence services to start-ups, companies in transition and established brands. Andy has more than 34 years’ experience in all facets of media, marketing, public relations and corporate communications