Chris Adams

Since Starbucks/T-Mobile managed to be the only game in this part of town, I had to venture out of the normal world of free Internet access with coffee. After spending a few minutes discovering that they'd helpfully deleted the old pre-paid account I setup a few years bck, I decided to pay $10 for a day pass since I have work to do and the prospect of using 9,600bps cellular service was too painful to contemplate.

Unfortunately, the "Express Day Pass" link takes you over to the new account section (you'll be forgiven for naively assuming "Express Day Pass" meant "Provide a credit card and start surfing"). The signup process features 1996-era form validation which helpfully discards everything you've entered at the first sign of an error. I know about this because they prevent you from using the only identifier you know is globally unique and available - your email address - and it turns out that a fair number of the other Chris Adamses in the world have used T-Mobile in the past.

The lesson for web developers is quite simple: respect your customers' time. We have computers to store information: it's inexcusably lazy to make a human repeatedly enter data you chose to discard and forcing people to guess unique names on your site is an exercise in solipsism in an age when anyone can easilygetafree, uniqueidentifier.

The more interesting lesson is a business lesson about expectations: I'm sitting here with a strong signal and plenty of bandwidth, feeling vaguely ripped off. I've been at coffee shops where the free wireless was flaky and I've worked with groups which provide free neighborhood wireless networks which are sometimes overloaded or malfunctioning and yet that never produced this sort of dissatisfaction. Pricing a commodity service at a premium rate makes it almost impossible to provide satisfied customers. Relying on a lack of alternatives has worked fairly well for the cable and wired phone companies but seems risky in a market with such low barriers to entry: I've only paid for commercial WiFi service a few times and the decreasing price for cellular data suggests that I'm not even going to be in that market for more than about a year but that "ripped off" association will last longer - and it's going to stick to the entire brand, not just the WiFi.