Chicago air travelers suffer from not only the worst flight departure delays out of all U.S. airports this year, but many passengers also complain they get nowhere when trying to travel on the information highway at O’Hare.
Problems either connecting laptop computers to the Wi-Fi service or getting dropped by overloaded Internet servers soon after signing on are among the top gripes being made to the Chicago Department of Aviation.
And unlike many other airports that provide Internet service as a free courtesy to passengers, it is pay as you go in Chicago. The Wi-Fi contractor at O’Hare and Midway, Concourse Communications, charges $6.95 per day.
Banners posted all over both airports greet passengers, “Welcome to WiFi Zone.” But the banners don’t mention any fees.
“When one tries to log on to the new service, as I have at least two dozen times over the last three visits to O’Hare, you get immediately bounced out of the system,” passenger Tom Dailey said. “This was happening to everyone else around me with a personal computer.”
In August, more than 2,600 calls for technical support were placed by passengers at O’Hare and Midway, according to the Aviation Department. Fifty-six percent of the calls were related to log-in and configuration problems, and 8 percent were about disconnects.
Officials from Concourse Communications, which is owned by Boingo Wireless, did not return phone inquiries from the Tribune.
But Merlyn Graves, a technical support representative who responded to an e-mail from Dailey, said the company’s Wi-Fi network at O’Hare is “somewhat less stable than we or you would like.”
O’Hare and Midway are “beta sites” for Concourse Communications, Graves said. Typically, beta sites are temporary or new systems that have bugs still to be worked out during testing. As such, it seems that customers should be warned the service is unreliable before registering and paying with a credit card, and at least be offered a discount.
From January through July this year, O’Hare ranked dead last among the nation’s 31 busiest airports for on-time departures, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Thirty percent of the flights leaving O’Hare were delayed, and 29 percent of the flights were late departing Midway, which ranked just ahead of O’Hare at No. 30.
There is a direct connection between airport congestion and the Wi-Fi problems at O’Hare. Access points, which are Wi-Fi transmitters, get overloaded especially when unusually large numbers of passengers are sitting around the airport using their laptops while waiting for late flights.
“Any time there are significant flight delays at the airport, the system quickly gets saturated, and access points go down,” Graves told Dailey in an e-mail.
Airport officials–who previously did not renew a contract with T-Mobile, which frequent fliers say provided reliable service–now say they hope Concourse Communications and Boingo will iron out the technical snafus by Thanksgiving.
The existing Wi-Fi coverage is made up of a temporary network that is being replaced by one that’s expected to be faster and more reliable, said city aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams.
City officials say they have received relatively few complaints about the quality of the Midway Wi-Fi service, which is available beyond the passenger security checkpoints at the food court and the aircraft gate boarding areas. Nonetheless, the Wi-Fi service at Midway also is being upgraded, officials said.
