Slow Public WiFi Hotspots Pervade London’s Busiest 5 Airports

A new survey has examined the real-world performance of FREE public wireless Internet (WiFi) hotspots at five of the busiest airports around the Greater London area and found that most struggle to deliver more than a handful of Megabits (Mbps).

The study, which was conducted by Thinkbroadband between the end of August and early September 2015, appears to based off an on-foot visit to the Gatwick (LGW), Heathrow (LHR), Luton (LTN), Stanstead (STN) and London City Airports (LCY). Sadly no information is given about the number of tests performed, their locations within the airport and or the hardware used.

Never the less the results found that Stanstead (STN) delivered the best peak Internet download speed of 8.1Mbps (Megabits per second), which is still well below what most home users get. Mind you most homes don’t have thousands of active connections with varying different demands to consider.

The short report also briefly touches on upload speeds, although we’re not actually given any scores. We also don’t get a split to show the impact at different times of day, since it’s highly likely that a test performance during a low period will be far faster than one conducted at a busy one. Admittedly airports have fluctuating low and busy periods, but they do still exist.

On top of that it’s worth remembering that you can often sign-up for a premium hotspot account and these usually give you faster speeds. The cost of this can vary depending on the hotspot operator, but it’s usually under £10 (day passes sometimes cost only a few pounds less than a general monthly subscription) and some may get that for free if the hotspot is owned by a home broadband ISP (e.g. Sky Broadband [The Cloud] or BT WiFi etc.).

So how do airports in London compare with the rest of the world? A similar study conducted by RottenWiFi found that Suvarnabhumi Airport (BKK) in Thailand came top with a speed of 41.45Mbps (this appears to be an average rather than a peak), while Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport (CHA) in the USA delivered 30.98Mbps and Dublin Airport (DUB) in Ireland pushed out 19.45Mbps. After that the speeds drop away quite fast.

In an ideal world we’d expect London’s airports, which are among the busiest in the world, to be putting more effort into their WiFi infrastructure. Passengers often have to spend a great deal of time waiting for flights, which makes being able to get online an important tool for work or other distractions; especially as mobile (3G and 4G) doesn’t always work as well as we’d like.