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Comment by balls187 | Hacker News Reader

Haven’t ever encountered any place that had a wifi time limit. In the late 2000’s internet cafes had time limits but that was enforced on their own devices.

Is there a specific scenario where time limited wifi is common place?

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Besides airplanes mentioned in the other comments, this is also common in airports. Zürich Airport gives you four hours for free.

Stuttgart Airport has 60 minutes.

Virgin Atlantic lets you have 20 minutes of WiFi free and then you can pay for the flight or for an hour.

I think the name refers to the limits some airlines have. JAL for instance offers one hour free on some flights.

I was trying to understand how this could be used for flights. I've seen either having to enter your last name and seat, or loyalty plan number to get in-flight wifi. Are there really airline wifis that give every mac address a free amount of time?

A lot of airlines now offer free "messaging" - usually just text on common messaging apps like WhatsApp. I've been meaning for years to write some kind of server that could give me useful functionality over chat messages.

Pretty sure it will work on JAL at least right now. They just asked for an email. But it was also a new service so maybe to wanted people to try it. It occurred to me at the time that two devices with two emails should work for twice as long. For what I wanted to do on that flight, i.e. check and send a few messages the one free hour was fine. But yeah of course they could change it so that would not work.

I've been meaning for years to write some kind of server that could give me useful functionality over chat messages.

Already done:

WhatsApp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33568994

Facebook Messenger: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203946

SMS(!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8304409

Airplanes. Some airlines offer 30 minutes of free wifi or something.

I can't remember the last time I encountered this as an obstacle while flying. Don't you usually have to pay then log in from any device you choose?

The bigger problem is how utterly useless and unstable the connection is to begin with..

In the US, Delta and JetBlue offers everyone free WiFi.

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