Cognitive Resonance

Wifi – at the same time one of the most useful technologies of the last few years, and one of the most frustrating. Why?

Well, it’s useful because it allows access to the net without wires. Simple, eh? We’ve had a wireless network in my house for several years now, and although I usually plug straight into the router (I cunningly convinced my parents that the NTL cable box and our wireless router really should be in my bedroom!) it is nice to be able to connect from the living room or outdoors – though I don’t use it much.

It’s frustrating because of reception problems. My parent’s PC is located downstairs and at an angle, so the signal has to go through my wall, the roof of an extension on the back of the house, and then try and fight it’s way through the metal chassis of the PC itself. Needless to say, it isn’t very reliable… Finally, though, my father got a better aerial for the wireless card, an external one which can be positioned on the top of the router PC, and it’s much better. Which hopefully means fewer support calls for me!

It is also frustrating for a number of other reasons. Firstly, it’s pretty slow – a pain if you’re transferring files around. I’d ideally like to have a backup server running up in the loft or elsewhere (out of sound, out of mind…), but the primary restriction on this is the size of files it’d be backing up. Large digital photos, .psd files, my music… transferring this via wireless would be a pain in the neck really, and cutting holes in my parent’s house walls for Gigabit ethernet has been forbidden. Damn. The speed issues will be mitigated by forthcoming 802.11n products, but will still fall short of wired connections – and would require investment in new products which command a significant price premium (GigE cards can be bought for £15 even here in Cambridge, hardly the cheapest town in the world).

What else is there to say about Wifi? Well, in my opinion it only becomes truly useful when you’re out and about. Sure, it’s convenient at home not to be tethered to one room, but it’s truly useful when you’re out and about with a laptop or PDA. And there is the biggest problem I have with Wifi today – access away from home.

The majority of hotspots are provided on a commercial basis. There are a number of different providers in the UK including BT Openzone, T-mobile, and Swisscom. The Cloud offers access at its hotspots to both BT and T-mobile, amongst others. The problem is the cost. The individual providers have their own pricing structures, for starters. They are often complicated. They are also overpriced unless you sign up for a costly monthly subscription.

For instance, BT Openzone charges £6 an hour with a voucher (consecutive usage), or the same price with “Choice” (for renewable usage). Alternatively, they offer a “Pay as you Go” scheme for 20p a minute – £1 for 5 minutes, or the equivalent of £12 for an hour – pretty expensive (oh, if you want a day it’ll cost you £10, or £40 for 30 days). On a monthly subscription, 250 minutes will cost you £11.75 including VAT. 250 minutes is not long at all – 4 hours, 10 minutes – which makes it 4.7p a minute, then 10p per additional minute. You can get a 500 minute subscription for only £5 plus VAT – but only if you’re already a BT customer. You can get 4000 minutes for £25 plus VAT (or £60 for “unlimited usage”)… I’m singling out BT here, but it’s only typical of most providers. Then there’s the whole “roaming” idea which incurs further charges – of course, if your chosen provider isn’t at the hotspot you’re at, you have no alternative but to roam. I’ve not investigated this in detail, but I shall do…

Anyhow back to the general point – all rather complicated and frankly obscenely expensive. This kind of data plan is fine if you’re a mobile worker who is always out travelling (in which case you’d have a good case for convincing your company to pay for it anyhow), but what about the rest of us? We’re paying through the nose for service which doesn’t cost the provider any more to give us than a monthly subscription…

In my case, and I imagine most people’s, I don’t use Wifi outside the home often precisely because of the cost involved – not because I don’t want to. In fact, if you could pay “per minute” or for a resumable time period, at a reasonable cost I quite happily would do. However, I can’t – and there is no way I’m paying £11.75 for a monthly subscription which I might never use for 3 months, then use >250 minutes in one month (for instance, on holiday somewhere in the UK) and incur additional charges. A plea to mobile coverage operators – please, reduce your prices for occasional users to be more in line with heavy users. You would find far, far more of us use the service and more often, too.

GNER has recently announced that they will complete installation of Wifi to their entire fleet (including the diesel trains which I usually catch to avoid changing at Edinburgh) by the end of the summer – fantastic news. They have also cut their prices, and 24 hour access is now £9.95. As my journey takes almost 5 hours, this works out at just over £2 an hour – which is not unreasonable, given it’s on a moving train! I intend to make use of this service (or, if I can get a deal on first class for less than £10 extra, which has happened once before, use that as first class has free access). I hope that this service is a success for GNER, though I can’t help feeling that if they cut the price further (say, to £5 or so for over an hour) there would be a massive increase in usage. On top of the cost of a ticket, £10 still is fairly expensive if you’re travelling over just over 2 hours (120 mins is £7.95). Shorter time periods are also pretty expensive – £2.95 for 30 minutes. Finally, what about commuters or regular travellers? Costs will quickly mount up…

I think that Wifi in the UK still has quite some way to go before it truly takes off, and cutting access prices is part of this.

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