network access while traveling

[cellio]

I remember, when traveling in the 90s and into the 00s, looking for hotels with business centers, where I could use their computer to check my email. Technical and geek conventions that set up actual terminal rooms for this purpose were golden. (This happened even in the 80s for sufficiently-geeky contexts.) But mostly, the connected traveler was responsible for figuring it out or just doing without.

After reliance on quasi-public computers came the rise of laptop computers. I was late to this phase, only getting a laptop of my own in (I think) 2006. For the next while, I looked for hotel rooms that had ethernet ports. I took that laptop when traveling not for any work purpose but so I could access my email (and, on big vacations, upload photos somewhere so I didn't risk a single point of failure). I carried an ethernet cable for years. (I have a story from this time about having to fall back to a public computer, or rather a public computer's network connection that I probably wasn't supposed to touch, so public computers were still an occasional thing.)

A few years after the rise of hotel ethernet ports, places (hotels, restaurants, etc) started to advertise free WiFi. I still carried that ethernet cable because you could never be sure, and if there was an ethernet port I still preferred it. I only started to pay attention to public WiFi when I got a smartphone and later a tablet (which can't use ethernet). The smartphone's data plan had limits, so public WiFi seemed useful if I wasn't doing anything that required extra care. (Surfing yes, online banking no -- that kind of thing.)

I used a hotel's WiFi as recently as January, when I found evidence of some unwelcome probes that I couldn't explain any other way. After that I realized that for practical purposes I have unlimited data (it gets slower after 2GB/month but I rarely exceed that). At Origins a couple weeks ago, I dutifully took the piece of paper the hotel desk gave us with the WiFi access information, dropped it on a table in the room, and never touched it again, preferring to use my phone to create a hotspot so I could use my tablet. Much safer.

I'm back to arranging my own access and not looking for public accommodations. I feel like I've gone in a circle.

Comments

[siderea]

Re: MBTA passes:

Once upon a time, a pass was a thin piece of plastic with a mag-stripe, on which was encoded the value of the month-duration pass you bought, and printed with a color-coded highly visible indication of just which month and year it was valid for.

At that point, I was able to subscribe to a monthly pass program through my place of employment. Every month, around the 20th, I would get my new pass left in my mailbox at work. I would put it in my wallet, and on the first of the month, I would change over to the new pass.

They the MBTA moved to the new Charlie Card system, where the concept of the pass - an abstraction - is separated from the card - the medium. Now one card can be re-charged with a new pass. And they have a subscription service, so your credit card is automatically charged each month and you are automatically signed up for the next month's pass.

One problem. The only way to get the new pass onto the card is to physically take it to a machine that download the pass onto it. Those are all in subway stations.

But the MBTA, like most public transit systems with subways, has a large feeder-bus system. That means very many MBTA users' first leg of their daily journey is a bus to a subway station. And, there's such a thing as a bus-only pass - which is what I have - for those who don't need subway service.

Consequently, I have to make a little errand, once a month, on one of the last four days (or is it three?) of the month, to personally go to a subway station and bump my card against a fare machine to load the pass I already automatically paid for.

If I fail to do this, I discover it when I try to go anywhere on the bus, and discover it won't take me. Or, worse, if I also put any cash on the card for a la carte travel (such as for rare subway rides), it will drain that money first before I discover I don't have my pass on my card.

In this way, the system we used to have which delivered my pass to me 10 days early and never caused me any trouble has turned into a digital system which both now requires me to make a brick-and-mortar errand monthly to pick it up, and also periodically rips me off by charging me money for rides I have literally already paid for, to go pick up the pass I paid for.

[cellio]

Wow. That is *really* broken. :-(