Trouble With San Jose's WiFi
San Jose made some (small) amount of news last week for being yet another city to launch their own free WiFi in a downtown area. The San Jose Mercury News sent a reporter out to test the WiFi connections and the results aren't great. Basically, he couldn't login, even though he clearly had a signal - until he happened to call up the CEO of the company who runs the wireless service, who told him to move closer to where the access point was. Of course, most users won't have the CEO's phone number, and most won't want to call anyone just to get connected to a WiFi hotspot (even if it's free). As much as we WiFi addicts love the technology, we still need to admit that there are some usability issues that need to be improved.
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