A few days ago Martin Geddes wrote this piece about his experience of WiFi in Lithuania's capital Vilnius.
By coincidence, I'm currently sitting in a cafe in its neighbouring capital of Riga in Latvia. I ordered a very good cup of coffee for about £1.70, along with a one-hour WiFi prepaid card from Lattelecom for £1. The waitress, who knew exactly what WiFi was, brought the card to my table and added it to my bill. Username & password are a user-friendly 6 characters long, the login process equally simple.
My hotel last night also had a Lattelecom hotspot covering both public areas & rooms. Again, a very simple, memorable, hotel-wide login, with the cost covered by my room price.
I'll guess that in both cases, the cafe & hotel use Lattelecom's broadband services, and get provided with WiFi by default.
This is how public WiFi should be done. Take note, price-gougers at Swisscom Eurospot & peers.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
6 comments:
Dean, I have made a crusade of bitching about gouging around hotspot and mobile roaming whenever I travel around world. Two recent trips to E. Europe and India below.
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/06/the_new_banks.html
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/06/the-men-win-big.html
If all consumers, especially those mobile corss country complain may be telcos and hotels will pay attention?
Dean, I am your regular reader in Latvia. I would enjoy meeting you to chat about wireless future. If you have time, give me a notice
pavels . romanovskis (at) gmail
Over in Tartu (Estonia's second city, at the other end of the Baltics) we have free wifi coverage over almost the whole city, and coffee's cheaper too :) Tallinn also has plenty of free wifi.
Its good to see that someone has got it right. I say we put our hands together for their sucess and may it move in the direction of the UK.
Lucas
Wifi and Mobile phone deals
Not unusual to find buses, ships and trains fitted with wifi access points in estonia.
some random egs
http://www.muniwireless.com/article/view/5735/
http://wifi.ee/?p=news&lang=eng&id=321
yeah i agree. the uk needs for direction on this issue mobile phone deals
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