[Air-l] Internet Cafes in Airports

[Jennifer Stromer-Galley]

I have noticed few Internet Cafes per se, but as Brian Newberry points out,
rooms or places where people can take their laptop and connect up. Indeed,
when I was passing time in the MSP airport before flying home on Monday, I
noticed that in the food court I was eating at, there was a telephone jack,
that if I had a modem attached to my laptop, I could dial into my ISP. It
was fairly innocuous, and if I hadn't been sitting right in front of the
jack, I would not have noticed it.

A friend of mine worked for a company developing Internet kiosks at
airports, where with the swipe of a credit card, a person could access the
Web for 10 minutes at a time. His company went out of business after rolling
out Kiosks in 3 cities' airports. The cost of the Kiosks themselves, the red
tape at the airports, the cost of installing the fiber optics in the
terminals, led to their demise (along with the drying up of venture capital
. . . .).

It does seem to me that in this new age of air travel (with longer stays in
the airports themselves before boarding) that Internet Cafes (where the Cafe
offers jacks for those with laptops and computers for those who do not)
would be quite popular. 

~Jenny Stromer-Galley

Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
jstromer at asc.upenn.edu
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Newberry, Brian Wayne [mailto:bnewberry at ku.edu]
> Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 12:20 PM
> To: 'air-l at aoir.org'
> Subject: [Air-l] Internet Cafes in Airports
> 
> 
> I too have done a fair bit of traveling in the past year or 
> two and have
> noticed a lack of Internet Access in airports. I have never 
> seen an Internet
> Cafe in an airport but several I have been to have had some 
> sort of Internet
> access. 
> 
> Specifically, Salt Lake City Utah has little rooms you can rent with
> computers and Internet access. Several airports I have been 
> in have had
> Internet kiosks. I think Chicago is one airport with this system.
> 
> All of these require a credit card to use which can be a 
> drawback. I would
> also think that the coffee shop atmosphere of a cafe would be 
> a welcome
> addition to the process of communicating.
> 
> Ulla, can I invest?
> 
> Brian Newberry
> University of Kansas
>  
> <snip>
> Message: 10
> From: "Bunz, Ulla K" <ulla at ukans.edu>
> To: "'air-l at aoir.org' '" <air-l at aoir.org>
> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:42:05 -0500
> Subject: [Air-l] internet cafes
> 
> 
>  
> In the last three months, I've traveled a bit. I've been at 
> the following
> airports: Kansas City, Minneapolis, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Seattle, Newark,
> Frankfurt (Germany), Cologne (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and
> Stavanger (Norway). I'm also familiar with airports in major 
> cities such as
> Munich, Brussels, London, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Sydney, and
> Auckland.
> 
> And yet, at all these airports, one thing is missing.
> 
> How come I can't remember seeing any Internet Cafes in any of these
> airports? 
> 
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