Good Deal for ex Siricomm Subscribers
Posted on Dec 22, 2007 - 9:50pm by Wayne Weisser in Technology
From Flying J’s WIFI login screen:
Attention Former SiriComm Customers!
Purchase any WiFi subscription plan and Flying J will double it. Purchase a day, a month or a year and you can double it easily. All you need is proof of a recent SiriComm subscription purchase.
After being burned by more than one WIFI service, I might be a little cautious spending more money, but Flying J’s WIFI has always been the best for speed, and availability. Especially since they are not only on the truck stop sites, but near other brands of truck stops as well.
Like Phil said here, this is one step closer to Flying J’s WIFI domination. At least they have the record of being reliable instead of out-sourcing another way to take money from truckers.
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What gets me is that I can go to a coffee shop and spend $3 and get free wifi, but if I spend $600 at the truck stop, I have to pay. Of course the profit margin on coffee is much different than fuel, but the truck stop is still clearing a bigger overall profit.
It’s not that expensive or complicated to setup wifi. They do not even have the decency of broadcasting it to the entire parking lot.
I’ve only used truck stop wifi once, before I realized that I could buy an antenna for $50 to solve speed problems on my Verizon service. It was at a Pilot and it was really bad. I feel sorry for the drivers that buy the service for an entire year.
I’ve been using Flying J from the beginning and reception would vary depending on where you were at in the parking lot. They went in and improved every single stop so now you have a very good signal throughout the entire lot. Other truckstops didn’t do this and you could tell the difference from one truck chain to another and flying j. Plus flying j wifi is at more than just Flying J’s, they advertise 170 flying j locations with 141 other truck stop locations. That’s a lot.
I keep a flying j wifi account mainly because I always try and fuel there and I have my verizon card for other times. Usually a flying j wifi will out perform even the broadband verizon and will dust the ‘national access’ option that you usually get out in the woods.
I started off with Flying J wi-fi and used it for a while. Perhaps a year? I definitely did notice that signal strength was location dependent within the parking lot….back where I’m forced to park with big loads it was weak to none. I had many a discussion with local Flying J folks about that very thing. Neither of us left the conversation happy. That was probably the reason I let my subscription lapse. I’m glad to hear that they’ve improved. I was at a motel a while back and got to talking to their “wi-fi guy”. He said he had antennas set up every hundred or so feet….so that there was overlap. From what he said and what I’ve done at home on my own network (using it right now) it would seem to be easy to do a good job….cheap too.
That tells us something about TA and Pilot.
.And yeah….why is it free at Barnes and Nobel…StarBucks…..Air Ports…University Campuses…. motels……and hundreds…..thousands……. of other hotspots including rest areas in Texas….but TruckStops CHARGE extra?
My seven or eight hundred dollars in fuel and ten , twenty or thirty dollars in the restaurant and store and maybe two to three hundred in the shop isn’t enough? I’ve actually spent over a thousand dollars in a 24 hr period at a truckstop….and would have had to pay MORE if I wanted their Wi-Fi.
Wow – Mark – you used WiFi at a truck stop once. That must be the reason you’re so confidently able to make the astute comparison regarding the level of investment necessary to install the WiFi/Internet infrastructure at a truck stop with that of a home or coffee shop.
First off let me say these ripoff WiFi truckstop ISP’s need to quit identifing themselves as “High Speed” WiFi when it is only 11mps. This includes the Flying J, as well as Idle Aire. The best one so far is the TA which offers 54 mps, which is now “Medium WiFi”. The Flying J only offers the 11mps which is “Low WiFi”. They could alleviate the problems in their lots by doing two things, installing the new “N” Wifi, which has way better range, and actually using “Outdoor” antennas. Most of the ones you see, including the now defunct Sircomm antennas are actually indoor ones. That is why when it rains or there is poor weather, suddenly their WiFi service is on the blink. Time for the truckstops to quit ripping off drivers when it comes to this service. I went cellular after one disappointment after another when dealing with the various truckstop ripoff WiFi services. We’ll not even mention the low byte limits per day at the Flying J that do not even allow you to download a movie or music without having to pay for an additional day. My opinion, they all pretty much suck. Only the TA has barely decent WiFi.
The “speed” of any Wi-Fi connection used, primarily, to access the Internet is all but irrelevant. The fastest hard connections used by any hotspot, and I mean ANY hotspot, are T1 lines rated at 1.544 Mbps ; far slower than the speed of the connection between client and access point.
There are differences in range between 802.11b and g due to, among other things, the fact that 802.11g requires less data transmission overhead and the fact that 802.11b modulates the signal using DSSS and 802.11g uses OFDM.
802.11n isn’t yet ratified and the “n” equipment now on the market may or may not be compatible with the final standard. No hotspot chain is going to invest a ton of money installing equipment that might not be standard compliant. It’s true that “n” has more range than “g” or “b” because, although the overhead is about the same as “g”, it utilizes MIMO; but if the Wi-Fi card installed in your laptop can’t handle MIMO then it reverts to “g”.
If cellular works better for you than Wi-Fi then that’s great, but you should know that even the cellular carriers have download limits along with restrictions on use that most hotspots, truck stop or otherwise, do not; like using VoIP, for example. Further, if you pay for Wi-Fi via long-term subscription, you can avoid the daily limits and your limit is then comparable to that of AT&T or Verizon cellular.
As far as the antennas used by TA and Flying J, they are, in fact, “outdoor” antennas. You should really listen to the Trucker Tech podcast, specifically, episodes 6 & 7, where nearly all your Wi-Fi misconceptions are addressed.