Ubiquitous Networking?

I was at Shannon Airport to collect the sister this morning. Sign up says ‘free internet access’. You just need to register. Two problems with this – registration was be email and I could not connect to my mail server securely until I had registered. Secure web browsing seemed to be unusable – possibly because I was using self-signed certs from my home server (at $200 p/a for a cert when it’s just for me is plain silly).
The other complaint was of course the everyone must use web 2.0. I cough politely, and remind people that not everyone has broadband access from everywhere. Considering that I use the laptop for most of my work, when I need to connect it’s over GPRS, and that’s just expensive from the get-go. You may complain about a 10cent text message (plus VAT) for 160 usable characters (which works out at 0.0625cent a byte), but the phone companies are charging 2cent for 1k of data. Not that I could ever get this working correctly. All those round-robin trips to the server could end up costing a fortune to the on-the-go user.
Well, rant, rant. It’s such a lovely day I think I’ll be outside.