Internet Connections at Overseas Airports

My trip to Asia is in full swing and it's gone on well so far. This is my first blog entry from outside the United States. I have traveled to Seoul, South Korea already and had a very good 'airport experience' there. After snooping around for some decent food to eat, I ran into a Subway and had my fill. Then I sat down to checkout my options for connecting to the inter-webs.

There were a lot of open wireless connections available but I decided to stay away from those. I found one that was secure and connected to it with a login page and passkey. It seemed like being the best one to use. The next thing I did was go to www.speedtest.net to check the speed of the connection. I was wowed! Take a look...

Speedtest.net @ Incheon International Airport in Seoul, South Korea

With speeds like these, long layovers don't feel long at all. It's not often that you get a reliable internet connection in public places, especially airports. I realized that a 20 down 20 up connection must be hard to find when I reached my next international destination in Asia.

My next stop was Bombay, India and the airport there is big and busy. Not much to do either. There are a couple of decent restaurants and airline lounges but that's about it. When I turned on the AirPort on my MacBook Air and scanned for available networks, I saw quite a few available. But none of them were secure. All open and 'FREE'. So I connected to one just out of curiosity to check the speed. All I got was 0.5 Mb/s down and 0.4 Mb/s up. I tried every single connection for speed after that and the best I got was 0.8 Mb/s down and 0.5 Mb/s up. It was hard to get much done but I didn't want to sign in to any of my accounts anyways with no secure connections available.

There is free internet at US airports but I don't think any of them are quite as fast as the connection I used in Seoul. We still lag behind in that aspect so there is a lot of room for improvement. With cloud-based computing on the horizon it won't be long before people start complaining about not having enough bandwidth to access their data from the cloud. The internet connections are a main reason why I think cloud-based computing won't take off just quite yet.