Lab Notes

BART Wi-Fi

This morning the local TV news featured a segment on BART adding Wi-Fi service. My interest was immediately piqued — we're all pretty regular BART users around here (in fact, I took BART to WWDC this very morning).

The devil, however, is in the details, and the BART Wi-Fi plan suffers from the same problems that other Wi-Fi rollouts have. Problems, that is, in acquiring people like me as a customer. It's just too darned expensive for what you get: $10 a day or $30 a month, for extremely limited connectivity. According to the news report, service is only available in stations, not on the trains. Because there is, at most, 15 minutes between trains, you will get at most 30 minutes of network time for your $10. And that assumes that you just miss the previous train on both your inbound and outbound trips.

Of course, you save money by buying the monthly pass. But daily BART riders, the obvious target market for monthly Wi-FIipasses, have the train schedules committed to memory — the real pros walk onto the platform just as their train is pulling up. That leaves no time for whipping out the laptop and hitting the network. What's more, daily BART riders are by definition commuters, likely riding at rush hour. Once Wi-Fi is rolled out on the moving trains, there won't be any room to set a computer on your lap. At rush hour, BART is standing room only.

Finally, there's the issue of whether you want to be seen with a laptop in a BART station, whether there's Wi-Fi available or not. There are definitely some stations on the BART line that I would not want to be seen carrying a multi-thousand dollar piece of electronic equipment, given the epidemic of iPod theft the system has been experiencing.