Boycott fee-based wireless hotspots!

ANARCHY!

ANARCHY!

Yes! I am now officially never using a wireless hotspot again. Not unless I have a stupidly crazy business critical need to do so.

I am sat in the M&S Moto service station outside Reading (that’s pronounced “Redding” for our international users, not ‘Reading’ as in “I’m reading a book”). I am waiting for the ridiculous traffic on the M4 motorway to subside so I popped in here after leaving Vodafone to check email and fuel up.

Obviously I was planning on using a wireless hotspot. I took one look at the uninspiring Moto wireless offer (five quid for an hour) and the T-Mobile one and thought, “No.”

No. That’s it. No need. We move on. What IS the point of paying twenty quid a month or crazy prices per hour when you can get a 3 USB mobile broadband stick for a tenner a month? Or a Vodafone one for 15 quid a month?

The fact that these services now actually work reliably should most definitely encourage providers of wifi hotspots to seriously evaluate their business models. I most certainly am not smiling politely at the owners of this Moto service station for flogging WiFi at me and I won’t be going out of my way to drop off at any of their other properties unless I absolutely need to as a result.

There’s definitely still a market for professionally managed services — I’m thinking iPass or Boingo — and I am still holding on to my The Cloud hotspot service for the time being. But now, when I’m UK-based, I will most definitely be using mobile broadband.