[Air-l] Re: airports

[Bram Dov Abramson]

 From a recent trip:

Copenhagen's airport has a wireless area in the regular waiting area, 
near the cafe and so forth.  It provides 802.11b wi fi networking, 
and binds credit card charges to DHCP in a nifty way.  The main flaw: 
no SMTP service available, which is perhaps understandable, but 
defeats the usefulness of using one's laptop considerably.

(An aside: as this sort of thing becomes more not less common, 
someone should really set up an account-based SMTP service.  It would 
be incredibly useful.  Right now the SMTP user interface is attached 
to a notion of e-mail accounts, when it should be attached to 
interface configurations.  As in, my outbound e-mail server changes, 
not according to my inbound POP service, but according to whether my 
laptop is in the office, on a dial-up, etc.)

Prague's airport has a combination casino/Internet access place.  The 
computers (running on NT) are in a separate space from the casino 
part, and there is lots of room on the countertops for spreading out 
papers and such.

>1) pay phone similar devices in quite a few airports, but they are expensive
>and not very handy

My experience is that these are not uncommon in U.S. and Canadian 
airports, and can be both cheap and handy.  Before travelling I 
usually add phone numbers for my access provider in each city whose 
airport I expect to spend time in, and where the pay phone jacks can 
be used -- they can be tricky to get the hang of, and I've given up 
on some (Ameritech springs to mind) -- they allow Internet access for 
the cost of a local phone call.  Which pay phones now seem to be 
metering in much of the U.S., but still not bad.

cheers
Bram
-- 
/ Bram Dov Abramson
/ babramson at telegeography.com
/
/ Director of Internet Research
/ TeleGeography, Inc.
/
/ tel: +1 202 741 0047 (new numbers)
/ fax: +1 202 741 0021 (we've moved)