Internet Access

Hey ARN, that access speed was impressive

My travels over time have taught me that the Internet is not omnipresent.

Public Internet assess is often overloaded and can, at times, present a poor user experience for the most basic of tasks, such as checking web mail.

A mobile hot-spot is a great backup and is often reliable. However, a mobile hot-spot can also suffer like public Internet access and present a poor user experience.

A particular example that comes to mind when my mobile hot-spot was unusable on several occasions was at the Atlanta airport (ATL).  There is an enormous amount of people coming and going at this airport.

Atlanta ATL Crownded

Atlanta (ATL) Terminal. Photo Credit: KBurchfiel2

For what it’s worth, the ATL airport is the busiest US airport by total passenger boardings year over year (Government uses the word enplanement 1).

Getting on with what was so impressive about Stockholm’s airport, the best public Internet experience I have had up to now was in the Swedish Stockholm Arlanda Airport (ARN), 100Mbps up/down! Snappy! My flight from Heathrow London arrived ahead of a colleague so I found a spot in the airport to setup and get some work done while I waited. This photo looks like the spot I was at where the person is in the white shirt is sitting on the bottom right side.

Stockholm Arlanda Airport (ARN) terminal. Photo Credit: Svartmetall Sverige3

 

 

  1. Enplanement is defined: Domestic, territorial, and international revenue passengers who board an aircraft in the states in scheduled and non-scheduled service of aircraft in intrastate, interstate, and foreign commerce and includes intransit passengers (passengers on board international flights that transit an airport in the US for non-traffic purposes). Definition source is Bureau of Transportation Statistics dictionary page: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/dictionary/list.xml?letter=E&page=1 ↩
  2. Found image via Internet search. Apparently sourced from a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVp2DCitKdw ↩
  3. Found image via Internet search. Apparently sourced from a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbTWmX6lIUo ↩