flinders street station this afternoon

In Melbourne today. Walked the length of Elizabeth Street. The CBD has so much more life than Sydney's CBD.

I tried Flinders Street Station and free Wifi on my iPhone. Not a good experience at 3 pm.

Inside the splendid entrance I found the link for the availability of "Metro free wifi" and checked that the operator was Netbay, as it should be. My phone made a connection, in the sense that a tick came up beside "Metro free wifi".

I ran Safari. There had been no invitation to log on. No advert appeared. After three minutes Safari reported that it could not open the default webpage because it could not open a secure connection to the server. So I disconnected from the WiFi.

I tried Telstra 3G connection, with immediate results.

3G is the real enemy of free WiFi. A cruise missile versus a blimp.

Then I walked down the street (?name) to the side entrance to Platform 1. At that place I did connect, and got so far as being told that I would be connected to the web after I had watched an advert. I waited five minutes. In spite of a continuous buffering signal, no advert played. Has GCN not been providing adverts to NetBay?

Further down the same street, at the entrance opposite Elizabeth Street, I could get no detection whatsoever of the availability of "Metro free wifi".

I gave up testing at 3:30.

How can I square my dismal experience with what GCN told the ASX on 30th April: "A strategy was implemented at Flinders Street Station . . . in Melbourne during the March 2013 quarter to simplify the registration process for users leading to a doubling of daily user traffic since implementation."

Was it just my problem today? I doubt it. Will things get better? I doubt it.

A WiFi at Flinders Street Station
Was GCN's promised creation.
Make a garbage collection
Of the whole erection?
Well - no point in continuation.