Public wifi

More and more places are offering public wifi.  This seems like it is a great trend, but it is causing problems with my electronic devices.  That may sound counter-intuitive, but I assure you if there was a single way humans could mess up this technology, we have found it!  Most public wifi is free as in beer, not free as in speech.  This means I can use the wifi without paying, but I can't do whatever I want on the wifi.  This has a negative impact in two ways.

The first problem that occurs is the acknowledgement of the terms of service.  To protect themselves, the public wifi provider gives you a screen to accept the terms of service.  Violating the TOS is a federal offense that will get you 35 years in federal pound you in the ___ prison.  The problem is all traffic will fail until you accept the TOS.  This sounds fine on the surface, until all your widgets are failing.  The widgets are using a background service that auto-update on a periodic basis.  Once you connect to wifi, the widgets use the wifi....regardless if you accepted the TOS.  At work, my company put up an employee off-duty wifi in the eating and public areas.  This wifi network could be accessed by our personal devices.  It has TOS-protection, though.  This TOS-protection kicks in every time I go to the lunch area (probably since I only eat lunch once a day).  This means, every day, I walk to the lunch area and all my widgets stop working.

The second problem is the firewall.  Many public wifi services only allow certain traffic.  Ports 80 and 443 are always allowed.  Sometimes you will be lucky and ports 22 and 3389 will be open.  Citrix Reciever is not usually allowed.  Also, since home ISPs traditionally block incoming ports 80 and 443, I can't access my home server.  Widgets may not function correctly as well.  The Facebook app seems to use 80/443 so it didn't have a problem, but some other widgets failed to work.

I am all for public wifi.  I also don't want to complain about the quality of something that I get for free.  What annoys me is that the public wifi tends to be crippled.  For many situations, like the one at my job, I end up not even using the wifi.  It is just not worth it.