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You have to say that WiFi market forces are alive and well.

In the shadow of one news site's much bruited campaign for fair WiFi prices comes an operator whose WiFi tariff is high enough to make the hairs on your teeth stand on end.

There's been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the cost of a service that many feel ought to be free, or nearly free. WiFi after all is cheap to deploy and run: you nail a £50 access point to the wall, hook it up to a DSL backhaul at a cost of, say, £20 a month? -- then sit back and watch the coffee drinkers roll in. Let's be charitable and say that you pay someone £100 to hook it up and test it, which should take all of 30 minutes.

For an upfront cost of £170, there's a service right there. With coffee at £2.50 a shot (this is rip-off Britain, remember) you have to sell just 68 cups of coffee to recoup that capital expense in gross terms. Let's call it 200 cups of coffee after overheads. Even if your coffee doesn't sell very well, you're in profit after less than two days' trading.

But as we all know, it's not that simple. In a market economy, the cost of provision isn't the same thing as the price the market will bear.

In a local coffee shop, you use the WiFi to add marginal revenue. On the Heathrow Express, which announced a WiFi service this week, it's all about wringing extra cash from well-heeled execs.

Already the most expensive railway in the world on a per-mile basis, the gougers running this 12-mile line are charging 75p for 10 minutes access during the 15 to 20 minute journey. The rest of your time will be occupied with firing up your laptop, finding your credit card, weeping over your keyboard, and powering down again.

Alternatively, they'll charge you £6 for an hour for a voucher -- one suspects it's one of those 'use it within 24 hours' affairs -- so if you're flying anywhere moderately distant, you've flushed most of that money down the tube. Further details are hard to come by since there's none on the company's Web site.

You would hope that the cash already flowing in from the price of the tickets would encourage these people to make the service complementary -- after all, there's not a whole heap you can do in 15 minutes, apart from discover that your flight's been delayed. And what exactly can you do with that information between the train terminal and the departures board?

So maybe the best thing is to boycott services such as this, which truly are a rip-off. After all, you're paying £1 a minute for the privilege of sitting on the train -- surely that's enough?

But hey, that's market forces for you...

Copyright 2007 Network Weekly.