Apr 5th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Small is Beautiful
I’m pleased to find that there’s free Wifi in the Jacksonville Airport, a welcome change from a weekend of internet access so spotty that even my Verizon broadband card only sporadically managed to get a signal. It’s my general sense that airports in smaller cities—Jascksonville, Albuquerque, etc.—are more likely to have free wifi than are the airports serving big cities. I can’t, however, think of a good reason why that would be. Typically big cities have multiple airports and thus some customer choice and competition. But if you’re flying to Jacksonville, where are you going to go but the Jacksonville Airport no matter how bad the internet options are?
54 Responses to “Small is Beautiful”
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April 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Might be a Florida thing: Tampa International has free Wifi. And some gorgeous terminals.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Small cheap motels tend to offer free wifi, too, while I always have to pay for it at any larger hotel or resort.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
It’s jacksonville the city competing with atlanta the city. not jacksonville’s airport competing with hartsfield. jville is trying to show people it’s “open for business,” is my guess.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
My general sense matches yours; small airports are much more likely to have free wifi. It also seems to be true that smaller/economy hotels are more likely to have free wifi than expensive hotels. A hotel that charges $300/night will charge you another $10/15 for wifi, but a motel that charges $50/night will have free wifi; perhaps it’s because they are targeting different segments of the population? Maybe something similar is going on here.
Two other possibilities: First, some small-ish towns are fairly rich, and provide free services that are public goods. Second, small town airports try to attract people who would otherwise go to the nearest big city. If you’re going to Chicago, then you’ll fly into O’Hare or Midway; with only two real options, it’s not a very efficient market. But if you live in downstate Illinois, you have to drive into Chicago, deal with traffic, and pay a lot for parking. In an effort to attract people who live outside Chicago, the Bloomington-Normal regional airport has free long-term parking. Going to Bloomington means that you can also avoid city traffic, deal with shorter security lines, and generally have a much pleasanter experience.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I grew up in Jacksonville and my family still lives there, and so I use the airport frequently. I’m glad you like the airport because they have done a lot of remodeling over the last couple of years. It is great that they have free wifi, especially because neighboring airports, especially ATL, charge for wifi.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Signaling: “We’re a modern, tech-friendly city that would love to house your new business.” Big cities don’t need to do that.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hypothesis: Small airports may want to offer more free amenities to encourage people to get there early, both to help out the concessionaires and to help level load people arriving as they are less equipped for a ’surge’.
Also, similar to what Eric said, free Wifi is likely cheaper to supply than any sort of subscription wifi, and so the latter is not worth it unless you have economies of scale. (there’s also the habit for larger entities to try to squeeze every single nickel out of their customers that for a variety of reasons, smaller entities don’t do as much – not to say they don’t do it)
And the Jacksonville airport does compete with Daytona Beach, Gainsville, and even Orlando for north florida travel (although that competition is nearly entirely on the airlines – which is similar to major metros: people preferentially pick BWI over Dulles nearly entirely on the basis of airfare). It also obliquely competes with driving (you can get point to point from Jax to atl in about the same length of time) – so wifi perhaps makes the marginal customer more likely to fly.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
or what everyone else already said. (including cities are the ones actually competing – this is what created hartsfield in the first place after all)
April 5th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
It’s really hard to set up a commercial wifi network. Small airport tech guys can’t handle it.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
It’s really hard to set up a commercial wifi network. Small airport tech guys can’t handle it.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Is PDX small? The WiFi is free there as well. As the bookstores are good too: Powell’s, with richer offerings than the typical excessively co-oped mega-bestsellers.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
In addition to what others have already said, it’s (at least partly) to do with the fact that small airports run as a municipal service, while big airports presumably feel the need to run as profit-making enterprises.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
In large airports the channels (if that is the correct term) would be so crowded that it would slow to a crawl, or worse. If WiFi was free I can imagine traffic could go up 10 times or more. In big airports there are more people waiting for connections or just plain waiting. I also suspect for all sorts of reasons legit or not, security, commercial, practical, that there is a bias towards discouraging internet use at airports.
On an unrelated note. I was in Silicone Valley once, motel in Mountain View. They have free municipal WiFi. It was down. My Holiday Inn Express service was down to. 2 days without internet in Silicone Valley. What a riot.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
My suspicion is that the big airports (and, especially, hotels) are locked into deals that charged for internet access before providing free access started to become standard for “third spaces.”
April 5th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Doesn’t seem to be free at Nashville’s airport, and it’s not exactly a huge city. Sigh…
April 5th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
As well as PDX, add Burlington and Pittsburgh to the list. (And according to some blog I just read, Lubbock too, though I don’t remember it from when I lived there.)
My armchair theory is that Kolohe may be right about economies of scale, especially because most of the free WiFi airports I can think of aren’t hubs. In hubs you get more people waiting for several hours who might want to use the WiFi (to pick a random example, to tell people that the airline blew their connection and that they’re going to be three hours late. So the economies of scale are even bigger than they look from passenger totals, and there really might not be much incentive for telecoms to try to capture the WiFi market in small airports. Denver seems to be an exception though, a big hub with free WiFi.
Portland and Burlington are also the sort of place that would install free WiFi because they love socialism and want to destroy the American way of life, but that doesn’t apply to all the other cities.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
It’s free at West Palm Beach (PBI), which is in competition with Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
This is similar to the situation at hotels: Cheap hotels have free wi-fi, even at only $70/night, while if you’re at a $300/night business-class hotel you have to pay $10 or $15 a day for wi-fi.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Big airports with lots of business travelers can make enough money charging for access that they don’t mind pissing off ordinary travelers. It’s no different from Hilton Hotels charging $20 a day for access while at Hilton Garden Inns, it’s free.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
My first guess would be that small airports face more competition than the larger ones. You (and most of the commenters) are thinking in terms of the travelers, but the real competition is not to attract flyers, but to attract airline routes. The large city airports have no trouble with this bcs many people need to travel to and from those cities, but small cities need some value-added to make them more appealing (reduced customer complaints, etc). Just a guess.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
I think there are some great explanations posted – especially technical challenge, hubs, and clogging traffic – but another possibility is just that free wifi hasn’t entered enough of the public zeitgeist to be a reasoned, consensus decision.
In a given segment of population, people are going to have a wide variety of positions on the subject of free wifi, and it seems likely that a given airport administration might just go along with their feelings (or animal spirits) in addition to bowing to technical concessions.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel like free wifi is an amenity that impacts decision making with regards to which airports you fly through, and as such, there’s probably a heavy degree of randomness and anecdotal evidence as to whether or not a given airport offers it.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
It’s also free in Roanoke, Virginia.
April 5th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Jacksonville is not a HUB airport, so you do not have many people waiting to make connections.
Consequently, people do not spend nearly as much time in the airport as they would at a HUB airport and so are not as willing to pay for internet access.
Check and I’m sure you would find that the typical HUB airport charges and the non-HUB airport does not.
April 5th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
A small airport is not big enough for a commercial wi-fi seller to bid on. So it does it itself for free, or just doesn’t bother to offer it.
April 5th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
RE: Matt Weiner:
I’d completely forgotten about our desire to destroy the American way of life here in Portland. Excellent point!
April 5th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Here’s a list of airports offering free wi-fi http://www.wififreespot.com/airport.html
As spencer, rapier and Matt Weiner speak to, there’s not a hub airport in the lot (with the wishy washy exception of PHL and the unique exception of CLT, which has a slightly flaky status as a USAir hub because it has a relatively low proportion of originating traffic — it’s mostly connect traffic, and anyone with an itinerary that connects at CLT probably also has one over ATL, a much bigger airport. Plus CLT has always presented itself as a passenger friendly place (my wife tells me you can get a pretty good plate of BBQ there)).
Smaller and spoke airports usually find themselves in competition with other relatively nearby airports — for example, Tallahassee competes (for passengers starting their trips near Tallahassee) with Jacksonville and Atlanta, so every little perk helps. It may also be true that the load on a free network at a large airport that is constantly quite full could be very demanding, and that charging for providing service to a small airport might not make business sense. Airports already have their own wireless networks for internal communications so much of the infrastructure to provide a free wi fi service at a small place is already in place.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
bse, small airports use their level of airport service to attract passengers — competing for airline service is one aspect of competing for passengers (that’s why airports will give sweetheart deals on gate access and landing fees to the airlines they are trying to attract). Free access to wi fi is another.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Jacksonville is a “smaller” city? By land area, it’s the largest city in the Lower 48!
April 5th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
for those keeping track of such things, here’s the top 35 airports in the country, the so called OEP airports.
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/publications/oep/faq/Airports/index.cfm
April 5th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
Vancouver has free (and very fast) Wi-Fi, whereas the service costs like $7 at Seattle. Vancouver is smaller than Seattle. Draw your own conclusions.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Unless you are talking middle-of-Montana isolated, the business traveler usually has a choice of several airlines, corresponding mini-hubs, and terminal airports to use when flying to a remote location – the combination of (fly + drive) time or (fly + drive + wait + connection) time is often a tossup.. The regional airports would like either the mini-hub or the terminal destination to be them, rather than Elbonia International over in the next county or worse yet Big City Airport on the other side of the state. So they tend to offer much better amenities and service than the biggies.
Cranky
April 5th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I’d completely forgotten about our desire to destroy the American way of life here in Portland.
I meant it as a compliment.
April 5th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Plus CLT has always presented itself as a passenger friendly place (my wife tells me you can get a pretty good plate of BBQ there)).
CLT’s food court is one of the best I’ve ever seen at an airport. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I had a quesadilla there last December, and it was 1,000X better than anything you’d ever get at Taco Bell.
April 5th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
It’s free at Denver International which is a big airport, a hub, and serves a large city — the only large city for hundreds of miles. Why the exception?
April 5th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
One reason why you don’t often see free wifi access at hub airports is that the airlines which operate the hubs will have their own frequent-flyer clubs at those airports. Most or all airline clubs offer free wifi access, and of course the airlines want people to pay to belong. An airline that operates a hub likely has enough influence with the public authority that runs the airport to get a no-public-wifi policy in place.
April 5th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
Location is also big. Jacksonville and other small town airports are often located somewhat in the middle of nowhere due to NIMBYs. Big city airports have had communities grow up around them that would certainly free ride the wifi as much as possible. And the fact that you have several orders of magnitude more people waiting at hubs than feeder airports.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I meant it as a compliment.
Which is exactly how I took it! Now I am off on my bike to subvert capitalism!
April 5th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Nathan — NIMBY issues often arise for expansions or upgrades of existing facilities, but airports of the Jacksonville vintage (mid 60s — early 70s) usually came about because existing facilities were insufficient to handle the larger jet aircraft that were entering into domestic commercial service, and communities had to get up to date (with big spacious facilities(in terms of tarmac and long thicker runways) that had room to grow) if they wanted to continue to have adequate airline service. DFW is a contemporary and a case in point, built to serve both Dallas and Fort Worth (in fact the airline signatories to DFW had to pledge not to continue to serve Love Field in Dallas nor Meacham Field in Fort Worth — Southwest was not a signatory which is how it snuck what was then service only within Texas into Love). And after airports get established out in the sticks, the communities grow out to them.
Here’s an interesting article on the wi-fi at DEN, which is free but sponsored — you have to watch a commercial http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/140462/denver_airport_gets_free_wifi.html
April 5th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
For me, it’s something, some principle, along the lines of: if there’s a lot of demand for it, it won’t be there for you (DC Metrorail and Metrobus now, Internet access in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport), whereas if there’s much less demand, service will be better and you’ll have more options (Metro 10 years ago, Internet access in Jax). Kind of cynical i suppose.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
James Mapes Says: What I’m trying to say is that I don’t feel like free wifi is an amenity that impacts decision making with regards to which airports you fly through..
I tend to agree. Ticket prices, flight offerings, ease of access to airport are probably the key drivers when travelers are making plan. It’s unlikely that someone is going to pay $50 more to fly out of an airport just because it has free WiFi.
Also, business travelers can expense their internet connection charges, so saving a few bucks to send emails may not be worth going to an out of the way airport for free WiFi.
Also, I have worked for companies that do not allow you to do any company business on public WiFi networks due to security concerns.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
for what it’s worth, I’ve spoken with people involved in terminal operations at major US airports, and they say that when airport people get together at conferences and what not, the most frequent topic of conversation is bathroom space — how much to have and how to keep it tidy and hospitable.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:25 am
Matt was in my city and didn’t even call me. I’m broken hearted. I could’ve shown you some true American sprawl.
I have nothing substantive to add. Just glad my humble hometown got a shout-out that wasn’t negative or related to football.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:39 am
Jacksonville is a “smaller” city? By land area, it’s the largest city in the Lower 48!
Sorry to burst your bubble, but:
1. Land area has very little to do with airport traffic.
2. It’s only large because the city consolidated with Duval County.
3. Second-largest city by area in the lower 48? Anaconda, Montana. Not exactly a bustling metropolis.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:45 am
It’s unlikely that someone is going to pay $50 more to fly out of an airport just because it has free WiFi.
Yeah, doesn’t airport WiFi usually cost somewhere around $8-$15? I won’t pay that (partly because I should really be doing something else anyway) but it would be crazy to spend more money on the ticket for the free WiFi.
when airport people get together at conferences and what not, the most frequent topic of conversation is bathroom space — how much to have and how to keep it tidy and hospitable.
My most recent airport experience makes me think this is a good thing. When you have a lot of people traveling in confined spaces for a long time in which it is inconvenient to impossible to use the bathroom, and then you vent them into a space where they’re extremely pressed for time, and when they’re unusually likely to have had their normal daily rhythms disrupted anyway, it’s less than ideal when you’ve shut down one men’s restroom in the wing for cleaning and one of the three toilets in the other has been trashed — you get people waiting in lines when time is of the essence. Fortunately in this case nothing bad happened.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:37 am
>> ames Mapes Says: What I’m trying to say is that
>> I don’t feel like free wifi is an amenity that
>> impacts decision making with regards to which
>> airports you fly through..
> I tend to agree. Ticket prices, flight offerings,
> ease of access to airport are probably the key drivers
> when travelers are making plan. It’s unlikely that
> someone is going to pay $50 more to fly out of an
> airport just because it has free WiFi.
It is certainly an input into the overall “hassle factor” decision about which airline/airport to use. Particularly if there is a chance of being delayed at any of the airports along with way. That hassle factor is very high these days and yeah, free Internet service is something I hear business peers talking about when making their travel decisions.
> Also, business travelers can expense their internet
> connection charges, so saving a few bucks to send emails
> may not be worth going to an out of the way airport for
> free WiFi.
If you throw a “some” in there I will buy that. Many are not, in fact, allowed to put additional fees such as Internet service on their expenses. Got this little recession going on you know?
Cranky
The lack of a preview function of Yglesias’ blog must be destroyed!
April 6th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
1. Not enough buyers of WiFi in smaller airports to provide profit for operator;
2. Smallish places like Des Moines (where i live) have a “sorry you had to travel to our backwater town, so we’ll try and make the hour you spend waiting for your plane pleasant” inferiority complex.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Las Vegas has free wifi, but I bet that airport makes a lot more money off of “other activities” then they ever could by charging for wifi.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Most or all airline clubs offer free wifi access, and of course the airlines want people to pay to belong.
Same thing with high priced hotels. They don’t usually charge you to join the frequent-stay club but almost always if you join you get free internet. The ten dollar a day charge is to get you to join the club. They then have your email address….
April 6th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
The airlines serving LAS should roll the dice and let passengers win upgrades on a slot machine!
April 8th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
This is very hot info. I think I’ll share it on Digg.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:27 am
FANTASTIC!
April 12th, 2009 at 4:52 am
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks
April 15th, 2009 at 4:43 am
I noticed that this is not the first time at all that you write about the topic. Why have you decided to touch it again?
April 16th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Good Day. The older I grow, the less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath.
I am from Islands and learning to speak English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: “Official site of northwest airlines, with reservations, flight information, company news, cybersaver fares, vacation packages, and the worldperks frequent flyer.”
Thank you very much 8). Zeva.