This is broken: Cingular wi-fi service
I'm in the Denver airport trying to make the most of a five hour layover. I think I've spent about 24 hours here on Concourse B over the past year. Air Canada and United both fly out of Concourse B, and it's a common hub for Edmonton flights.
Cingular has a wifi network here which, up until a few minutes ago, I was hoping to use to send some long overdue email. Great, I thought (prematurely), I can send one of my clients the report I finished on the plane. I opened up Firefox, got out my credit card, and saw this (errors marked for your convenience):
Here are the problems:
- I can't enter a Canadian province as part of my address. The state is checked against my credit card billing address, so I can't even fake it. There's no way I can buy the service.
- This is minor, perhaps, but I'm prompted to enter the last four digits of my SSN. Except that I don't have one because I'm not American.
- So I go to call customer support. I open my Sidekick and enter the first seven numbers. Then I try to find "w" on the keypad--but the Sidekick doesn't have letters on its keypad. I could try to guess, but instead I'm off to the FAQ to see if they've listed the number, while noting that they have enough space in that column to include not just the full numerical telephone number, but a binary version as well.
When I finally got through to customer support (and that took two calls), I was told that Cingular's payment partner won't accept credit cards with addresses out of the US. This is same credit card I used to purchase my flight, check in, buy lunch, snacks and a magazine. But I can't use it to buy $10 worth of wifi.
Lest this seem like whinging, I am in an airport that's a major hub for Canadian flights. (Emphasis added for the benefit of the people at Cingular who haven't figured out that international travellers use airports too.)
(In case you're wondering how I posted this, it was written yesterday. But I was all full of pique and didn't want to waste it. Anyway, you get the point. Boo Cingular!)
