The hotel I am staying in does not offer wireline connectivity to the Internet, but has a hotspot. The hotspot is serviced by Swisscom and has tiered tariff. Well and good? Not really. The service is tariffed as if the connection they are offering is a circuit-switched service, meaning it is based on connect time and not on bandwidth used either on the radio or on the backhaul. The real accounting mechanism is worse than straight connect time. It is also has a single use restriction. That is if you buy a 30 minute card, you can log on to the hotspot once and use it for a maximum of 30 minutes. This is another example of pricing not matching the basic service offered.
Posted by aswath at February 6, 2004 03:41 AM