FCC Nixes Airport's Ban On Private Net Access

Several readers wrote to let us know about a ruling by the US Federal Communications Commission forbidding Boston's Logan Airport from shutting down airline-supplied Internet access services that compete with the airport's own, for-pay wireless coverage. From the article: "A two-year effort by Logan International Airport officials to shut down private alternatives to the airport's $8-a-day wireless Internet service was decisively rejected yesterday by federal regulators, who blasted airport officials for raising bogus legal and technological arguments."

List of US airports with free wifi

[krakelohm]

Here is a nice lil list I found a while ago of US airports with free wifi, enjoy.

http://www.wififreespot.com/airport.html [wififreespot.com]

Re:I'm glad.... I think....

[mspohr]

The FCC was involved because Massport had complained to the FCC that the WiFi service would interfere with other radios... the FCC rightly said this was shenanigans.

Re:I'm glad.... I think....

[gb506]

The airlines lease physical space, in all probability their leases make no mention of wireless conditionals, the FCC controls the spectrum and is the arbitor when spectrum usage is in question.

How About Airports Charge $5 to Use the Restrooms?

[Slugster]

A few years back there was a newspaper article about (my) local airport: St Louis International--and how the pay phones were vanishing. With the arrival of cheap cellphones, the once-numerous pay phones were going mostly unused. Over a period of two years, they had removed almost 95% of the phones, and had plans to keep removing phones, because the revenues they were seeing were not covering the lease costs.

The airport management said that this wouldn't be a problem except that it was the revenue from the pay phones that used to pay for internal maintenance--that is, the phones paid the janitors. Most (US) airports were managed this way, and they didn't have anything else to shift funding from to allow for this loss. All the other fee structures they charged were to other companies, that were only for use related to what those companies did. The terms of these charges are set in contracts that cannot usually be easily, or immediately, changed.

Charging for 802.x was assumed to be the next internal maintenance income stream--but now, we see that it is not so.

....So then,,, (looking around),,, what else can they charge travelers for?....
~

Re:I'm glad.... I think....

[Brickwall]

Did you RTFA? Massport appealed to the FCC to shut down Continental, saying that the competing WiFi could compromise both ATC and other 'public safety' communication systems (note: the FAA has nothing to do with these other systems). It wasn't a case of the FCC sticking their nose in; Massport was trying to use the FCC to achieve their monopoly aim.

And the issue of whether a property owner can dictate that you must use their WiFi system is not the slam-dunk you think it is. If you rent an apartment, your landlord has certain rights on how you can use it (e.g. you can't run a restaurant in it) but can't tell you you have to buy mobile phones from him. To use your Starbucks example, you can't go into Starbucks and order a pizza from Dominos, but Starbucks also cannot tell you you can only read magazines purchased from them.