Andrzej's monthly column #3

Column

Column: Planes, Trains, Automobiles (CeBIT & Hotels)

Why is ‘communicating on the move' so crap? At home, I have landlines, mobile, Skype, MSN, email and every other technology for communication that you can imagine. All of it works. All of the time. Even when I move from room to room.

My house is not ‘high-tech' - no more than anyone else's - but somehow everything I touch just ‘works'. Also, it is incredibly cheap. My service provider charges me about €50 a month. That includes FREE LANDLINE CALLS, day or night, to anywhere in the UK - PLUS FREE INTERNATIONAL CALLS to 30 other countries... as well as 8MB unlimited broadband (to be honest, I only actually get 6.5MB, but that is fine!).

My mobile contract is great and the voice/data service is great in the UK. Everything is great. Until I step into the transport system or want to stay at a hotel. That is where my problems begin...

Spend any time travelling and you will see just how poor mobile communications are. Every country in the modern world has a massive intercity train system where each ‘unit' is a multi-million Euro piece of advanced technology, designed to whisk you from place to place at up to 200 km/h. Unfortunately, despite all of the new ‘Wi-Fi Hot Spot' stickers in the windows, you will struggle to maintain even a basic phone conversation.

"Sorry. We did not think that people travelling during the rush hour might actually be workers who want to connect to the world via their mobile phones or PCs".

A long time ago, someone at Virgin Trains here in the UK, decided to engage with Orange to form a partnership which would allow some kind of antenna to be introduced on Virgin Intercity trains, enabling phone/data communication. Why the antenna was not part of the original spec - no one knows.

In April 2006, Sir Richard Branson confirmed that ‘every Virgin train would allow passengers to use their mobiles and Blackberrys by April 2007'. It is now April 2007 (give or take) and I still can't complete a call on a train - Virgin or otherwise.

We have had the same bullshit from the air operators for years as well. "Please switch off all telephones for the duration of the journey until we have installed a cool way to bill you €20 a minute - at which point they will be safe to use" seems to be the tune from KLM, BA and Lufthansa. Modern phone companies go out of their way to assure us that we are in no danger of growing a third ear from the radiation given off... and yet they are deemed ‘unsafe for use during flight' by manufacturers like Boeing and AirBus in case they cause the plane to plummet to the ground, killing everyone on board. How many people have actually lost their lives because Sony, Nokia, Ericsson & Co cannot keep their ‘highly dangerous' signals under control? My guess is ‘none'.

Multi million dollar forms of transport like trains and planes cannot manage a simple ‘yogurt pot and string' communication service - but something humble and low tech like your average car is a fantastic place to do business from. It is safe, secure, allows any for of communication you can think of... PLUS, as long as you keep feeding it petrol, it will carry on giving you electricity so that you never run out of ‘communication juice'. Add a €30 Bluetooth headset to a car - and you are in comms paradise!

On a moving train, I can't remember the last time I managed to complete a call successfully. In my car, I can't remember the last time I lost a call.

So why have I included CeBIT and hotels in this list? Surely, you can make calls easily from any hotel in the world - and most have high speed web connection options. True. But they cost a FORTUNE. So, here's my point: ‘All the comms I can eat' costs around €50 from my home. For the whole month.Triple that price for my mobile. Guess what? We still have not got to the price charged for a single night's stay in a hotel around CeBIT or a return ticket on KLM/BA to fly there.

Cheap airlines and expensive airlines are all committed to safety. They all use the same planes, from the same manufacturers, with the same safety features and trained staff. Why don't the ‘famous name' carriers give us free broadband/communications as part of their ‘thank you' for not choosing Easyjet and Ryan Air ?

The last part of my rant is saved for hotels that charge over €100 a night - then want to charge you EVEN MORE to use broadband in your room. Since when did broadband become less of a ‘necessity' to a traveller than a TV, bath or shower?

When I discussed this with Koen at CeBIT, he made another great point... Why is it that the more expensive the hotel - the greater the ‘fraud' when it comes to charging for basics like phone calls and web access?

A friend of mine called Maggie Zaboura, wants to kick-off a campaign to force hotel's to offer free web access. How? Simple. If the great readership of HWI set up a forum thread in which they post a list of every hotel they find that gives broadband INCLUDED in the price of the room... then we can start to ‘vote with our wallets'.

I will go first and say that the last time I stayed in the SCANDIC in SILKEBORG, DENMARK - they did not charge me for web access... and the same can be said for the SUNTOWN SHERATON in JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA and the WILDEBOAR HOTEL in the same town.

Let's get a list going and see if we do our bit to FORCE POSITIVE CHANGE !

Andrzej Bania is Marketing Director for OMEGA SEKTOR which is a Cyber Theme Park with almost 600 PCs and Consoles. Previously, he ran PR & Marketing for ATI in Northern Europe and, before that, helped run the UK's number 1 award winning PC manufacturer.