The depressingly long list of locations that for whatever reasons are purveying Wi-Fi via closed networks continues to grow, as a brief visit to a recently opened River Market coffeehouse yesterday served to demonstrate. Maybe-just maybe-I ought to keep my mouth shut, but having had to dig out my old backup laptop to perform the Patch Tuesday ritual reminded me of an issue that I'm not sure many of the proprietors of these establishments have stopped to consider.
The Wi-Fi card in my old rig is a 2002-vintage model that can only support WEP encryption, not the much more secure WPA or WPA2 protocols that are currently state-of-the-art-which means that when the second Tuesday of each month rolls around I'm faced with the choice of whether to head into the den to harness the old gal directly to the router via an Ethernet cable, or hitch her to my slightly newer USB finder/adapter, which can do WPA, albeit only with difficulty and not all that reliably.
Which raises the question: How many potential customers who might still patronize a business despite its Wi-Fi being play-for-pay are being deterred by their older equipment not being compatible with the WPA encryption virtually all of these establishments are employing?
In other words, by closing their networks in the mistaken belief that doing so will increase per-customer revenue, how much money are they actually leaving on the table instead?
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