Free Wi-Fi is a thing of pure evil. It feels like the ultimate bait, to get someone like me to come in, sit down, spend a few dollars on a snack or something, and get the privilege of browsing the internet out in public. However, it never fails that I seem to spend more time just trying to get their services working than I do ever actually browsing like I intend.
It’s one of those things that seems silly. Why would you care to go out in public and use the internet? However, it’s an all too common thing. I actually greatly enjoy going out and just relaxing away from home, typing away, or just reading stuff I would normally avoid, due to the constant distractions my home life brings. It’s actually quite fun to take a computer out and just do whatever for an hour or two, such as I am doing right now. As I write this, I’m sitting at a local mall on an incredibly busy Saturday afternoon waiting for a friend to get off work. I could just as easily have gone home and done my normal routine, but I decided against that today. I wanted to go out for the sake of it, so after work, I walked over to this mall to sit down, drink some coffee, and maybe do a bit of web surfing and typing. That is when all the trouble started.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a slow connection. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was one that you had to be in a certain area to gain access to. This beast, however, is much worse.
By that, I mean, this has to be the most insane router in the history of technology. It simply refuses to ever function correctly, instead, rejecting your laptops connection, refusing to load pages, loading slowly, all randomly as it sees fit. It is insane to think that the wi-fi connection of a multi-million dollar shopping center in a major city would behave such a way, but it does, and no matter what you say to management about it, it continues to behave absurdly.
Of course, as bad as it is, at least it works. For years on end at a restaurant a mile down the road from my house, Wi-Fi has never worked. It is as if someone has never thought to actually give internet access to a place that advertises such fully on their windows. I have checked with management and indeed, they seem to simply not have any form of internet service hooked up to the router system, making it completely useless. Of course, a competing restaurant across the street does have funtional wi-fi access, which is also strong enough for you to get from inside the original location in question. Funny how that works, isn’t it
Of course, some other locations have wonderful free access, that I use often when I want to be out of the house. However, you only have access where you are, and I’m not going to go out of my way for free internet access. It’s a matter of convenience is all. It seems though, more often than not, free Wi-Fi is more trouble than it’s worth.