Wish all airports had free Wi-Fi

I do not fly very often; usually it just seems to be once every couple of years. The last time I flew was when I visited a friend who teaches in Utah on mid-winter break last year.  Since I don't fly very often, I don't know the ins and outs of lots of airports, but something I read in blog I just came across, Building a Smarter Planet, reminded me of a frustration I had at DTW when I was last flying out of there in Feb. of 2009.  I came across this blog, by the way, because there was a link to it from a ReadWrite Web article that came up in my reader, which was called, "Airports, Prisoners & Hospital Patients: Today's Top Stories on Internet of Things".

The blog posting to which I was led that reminded me of my frustrating airport situation was titled,  It's Time for Better Technology in Airports.  I remember when I was flying out of DTW last February I brought my laptop along.  Like I said, I do not fly very often, so I was surprised when I was pulled out my laptop to try to kill time in the airport and realized that you had to pay to use the wi-fi. This was super annoying to me, and I did not want to pay.  As I looked around at people, I noticed many people of the other people who were waiting were engrossed in their phones. These people must use the Internet on their phones. I was the old school person who did not check my email or facebook from my phone (I still don't access the Internet from my phone).  So I had to sit there pretty bored, as I had been planning on being entertained by surfing the web on my own laptop.

The posting I read, however, was not venting about how annoying it is that some airports charge for wi-fi.  This blog author was instead complaining about the poor quality of technology used in airports' "baggage handling and security checkpoints".  I thought it was ironic when he mentioned that DTW has the highest customer satisfaction ratings when compared to other large airports.  Haha. I guess perhaps people don't mind so much having to pay to get online.  Or maybe wi-fi accesst is free now at DTW, although it wasn't a year ago. Or maybe most people don't really care, because they can get mobile web on their smart phones. That is probably the likely explanation.