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You can get free Wi-Fi in a pub or restaurant when you order a meal or a drink, you can get free Wi-Fi in service stations and in the supermarket. You don't even need to have made a purchase to log on and connect to the Internet. You can even get your social media fix in the bakery (Gregg's) while you are waiting on your Cornish Pasty.
There are places where free Wi-Fi would be extremely useful but you will often find that it is either time limited or not free, even after you have paid to use services, in some cases quite a lot of money. Examples of this are of course trains and hotels. To be fair not all hotels charge for Internet access and one of these is the budget chain Ibis. Premier hotels limit you to half an hour a day which is somewhat useful, but then there's the pressure to buy credit when you can't find what you need in that half hour or when you want some information later on.
Trains that don't offer free Wi-Fi are the main thing that I find annoying though, especially when your stuck on one for more than a couple of hours and you can't get a reliable mobile signal, which is more often than not the case. You are left looking at a good strong got spot that offers you connectivity and you can even pay by the minute. It's somewhat reminiscent of the bad old days of dial-up and entered Internet access.
As far as I am concerned this is just greed and it is unacceptable that these companies should try and squeeze every last penny out of you. They've got you where they want you and if there's no alternative , as quite often there isn't on a train, all they have to do is sit back and wait while the money comes in. I'm sure this is fine for those travelling on business because the company probably pays, but what about the average traveller?
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Also, they get delayed, and because time is money, passengers are often left stuck on a train, wanting to use wifi and forced or cornered somehow into buying wifi minutes.
What a sad world we live in.
But beware of "free Wifi" in pubs and other public areas. They wish to commercialise the arrangement. They want you to sign up to a lifetime of Spam, for just half-an-hour of free low level quality Wifi. That's a bargain for them. I refuse the service.
I also loathe the fact that my mobile phone operator forbids me to tether my mobile phone to the internet network, simply because I am a PAYG users. What matter should it be whether I use 1 MByte of data on my mobile or sending an email from the Yorkshire Moors via my PC connected to my mobile phone. Just as everything else all these services care about is business users on huge mobile phone contracts and expense accounts. Well they are also behind the times. Most businesses today forbid their field staff from spending much using their mobile phones.
A land run train service should have the fastest internet services free for every traveller, at home or abroad.
Must be - it is so NOT user friendly at present. in fact, it is barely useable! When will it be finished?
Airport Bollocks