Well, after I heard about it on the news podcasts and such a day or two ago, I decided to use DEN’s all-new free WiFi network rather than my typical route: pulling out my USB cable and tethering my Sprint HTC Mogul to my computer via EV-DO. Previously, this was the laternative to paying out for an AT&T WiFi session, which I have never done.

Though I must admit to having purchased San Antonio’s WiFi…once…ad used T-Mobile’s hotspot service at DFW.

Anyhow, to the experience at DIA…

First off, when you cconnect (with a strong signal where  am…the Frontier concourse)  you’re presented with a usageagreement, which is standard fare for this type of access. Then you’re told you need to watch 30-second ad before you can access the ‘net. My ad was about Office 2007. I already have that product so it was sort of a drag, but okay…I’ll watch a 30-second ad for internet.

Once I finished the ad, FreeFi (DIA’s underlying Free WiFi provider) took about 10 seconds to authenticate me into the system, at which point I tried to load Google. It took a few seconds (I guess some more authentication was taking place) but the page loaded…with a leaderboard-size portion of my window dedicated to a banner ad and some info about FreeFi and DIA.

Interestingly, I’m using Firefox 3 Beta 1 and right now I’m surfing ad-free on the second tab I opened. And sometimes on other tabs. Maybe they only show ads sometimes. Interesting. Also, FreeFi isn’t losing anything; the ads I was seeing were public service announcements about whatever…you know, the ones form the Ad Council…

Which seems to remind me almost exactly of…NetZero. Remember that old dialup provider? You watched an ad while it was dialing in, then you had an ad banner running ac`ross the top  of the screen. There was software on your computer, so it was independent of your browser window. Whereas this system doesn’t install any software so the ads are just a frame on the top quarter of your web browser. But really it’s almost EXACTLY the NetZero concept. But hey, if it gives them enough money to run WiFi, so be it.

Speaking of money, maybe they should offer a non-ad version for a little extra. And offer download priority to those users. I don’t think ad-supported WiFi for free is perfect, but anyhow…on to the speeds…

I went to SpeedTest.net and honestly the connection seems to still be your typical T1…except with the FreeFi system sopping up some ping time to do all that ad servng. And of course there are tons of people using it, because lots of people come to airports with WiFi-enabled laptops these days, and if there’s free WiFi people tend to use it. So my download speed was around 490-500 kb/s while uploads were around 500-750 kb/s. Definitely not capped, and definitely a T1, with definitely many people using it. Okay, maybe it was capped at 512/768 but I doubt it. Anyhow, the last piece of the equation, latency, was about 150 ms.  I also looked at SpeedTest.net’s results comparisons…looks like they might have multiple T1s or such because some people have broken 1.5 Mb/s on the upload. Though on downloads the average is 500 kb/s, ranging between about 375 and 650. Uploads vary wildly between 200 kb/s and 2.2 Mb/s. Latency goes from about 100 to 210 ms, with the average being, again, about 150. In short, don’t expect stellar network performance, but it is generally better than what you’d get with cellular internet and can be used for stuff like YouTube  with reasonable ease.

So I can see why DIA WiFi usage increased tenfold because of ths introduction of free public WiFi (and we’re not talking about that stupid point-to-point network that keeps floating around). Though it does take a little while to get online, you do have banner ads when you’re online, and performance, particularly latency, isn’t that amazing, it is free and decent enough that I may well not chose to break out my cell phone for tethering, even though my download speeds on EV-DO might be a tad faster, latencies would be similar, and ads would be nowhere to be found…at least, not from my ISP. 🙂 Now to get San Antonio and Austin airports to follow suit…