I was in San Jose airport last week waiting to fly home and was told there was free wifi. I had a few hours to kill and I went to the Bits & Bytes bar, plopped down ordered a Tuna sandwich and a beer expecting to spend a few hours working. Well, low and behold, don’t fall over anybody, the wifi in the airport was terrible. I was able to connect on and off for about 30 min, then it went totally dark. Of course it was in the middle of a Skype chat with Andy Abramson who was in the next terminal over and we were trying to coordinate meeting up. Well, that never happened and I blame it on the crappy wifi. I’m learning more and more that free public wifi in airports can’t even be counted on to check email and IM with friends. I wasn’t expecting to make a video call, but I didn’t think retrieving my email should be so taxing on the airports wifi infrastructure.
Anyways, that’s another airport that gets a big fat zero in my book.
1 response so far ↓
1 Diane Mack-Williams // Sep 26, 2008 at 11:36 am
Jeb –
Sorry to hear that you couldn’t get a good signal when you were in SJC. When I saw your post this week, I went out to Bits & Bytes in Terminal C to see what the problem was. I talked to the bartender and some customers and learned that the bartender sometimes sees people wandering around with their laptops looking for a better signal. That’s not a good sign.
We’ll do some analysis of the signal and see what we need to do to improve the system in that part of the terminal. Maybe just another AP. Although we’ve had a lot of great feedback from passengers since we switched on our free WiFi system at SJC in May this year, we know with any new system we’ll need to keep tweaking it to make sure it’s operating as advertised.
Please let us know if you ever run into technical difficulties next time you’re in San Jose. It’s with feedback like this that helps us deliver great service that our customers should expect from us.
Diane Mack-Williams
Director, Airport Technology Services
Mineta San Jose International Airport
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