I am on the road again. Or, to be a bit more precise, I am on air: flying to Dublin. But right now, I am stuck. Stuck in Stansted. The connection flight of Ryan Air is delayed. Three hours.

London Stansted is the place where you don‘t want to spend more time than necessary. While this is true for most airports, it is especially true for this place. As you might expect there is NO wireless Internet available. Even you were willing to pay for it, there is none. Instead, Internet is provided only on telephone-cell-style public terminals. Of course, these boxes only give you a Windowish mail and web interface, which I am not interested in. These features would have blown me away in 1995. Maybe even 1996. But for today, this is an embarassment.

I don‘t get why Airports don‘t get it. Maybe it is because they want you to stroll the malls but I guess they just don‘t understand the advantage of offering Internet in the same style they offer toilets: ubiquitous, naturally and for free.

So many companies now try to set up so called „hot spots“ on public cafés and other areas offering Internet with prepaid cards or other modern obstacles charging you a fortune for every minute without taking account on how much data you actually send. Selling air time for a data path that is not used at all during that time is WEGELAGEREI.

Well, we know how this will end: it won‘t work. People won‘t accept it. At least they won‘t be able to accept the cost that is created by choosing such a complicated way of accounting and payment. So finally nobody is happy: neither the companies offering the „service“ nor the „customers“.

Restaurants, bars, airports… they should finally get it: put Internet on the same ilst where you find electricity, water and toilet paper. People consider Internet to be an ubiquitous resource and prices are so low now that it is no problem offering it at no charge as it will attract people to come to this places because they know they can stay connected.

So I am siitting at the cold spot now. No internet, no connection flight. Frustrating. But then again, a good chance to write a longer entry for this blog in peace :-)