First rule of marketing: If you’re going to advertise a cheeseburger, it had better come with both cheese and a burger.
No excuses about the Big Cow cartel creating an artificial beef shortage. No long explanation about the logistical challenges that mean you can only get Kraft slices on alternate Wednesdays. Either deliver the burger as promised, or take it off the menu.
Which would explain why B.C. Ferries has quietly abandoned on-board Wi-Fi on three of its routes, including Swartz Bay-Tsawwassen and Nanaimo-Horseshoe Bay. It never worked properly and they couldn’t make it better, so they pulled the plug.
“Extensive research and analysis of various technology solutions has shown it is not possible to improve the Wi-Fi service on our ferries to the level expected by users and we continually receive complaints about the quality and reliability of the service,” the corporation said in explaining the decision.
This is an interesting point: when B.C. Ferries gave people the option to use Wi-Fi, passengers moaned about how undependable it was. But after the corporation keelhauled its routers July 5, only a few customers complained. The problem wasn’t that B.C. Ferries didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was that it promised connectivity but couldn’t deliver.
Really, it was pretty bad. Did you ever watch someone try to fire up an iPad on the Coastal Perspiration? “Oh, you sweet poor child,” you’d think while the passenger stared and stared and stared at the Spinning Wheel of Death, certain that at some point he or she would get to watch Thor: Ragnarok. Really, these people looked like Trump supporters sitting on the courthouse steps, waiting for the recount.
Then reality would set in and they’d start to loathe the ferry system’s wireless service, loathe it the way Canucks fans loathe Brad Marchand. If you were on the upper deck and some guy began pounding his keyboard like Jerry Lee Lewis, snarling and raging like a Twitter fight, you’d know why: The Wi-Fi signal was weaker than American beer. Erin O’Toole and Jagmeet Singh have a stronger connection.
It’s not like B.C. Ferries didn’t know this, or care. The crappy Wi-Fi threatened to tarnish its image, just as the much-loved/ridiculed Sunshine Breakfast did a quarter century ago. Remember the Sunshine Breakfast? While a big seller, it was also the source of much derision, thanks to an alarming Day-Glo sauce that looked more like toxic waste than hollandaise. (I once wrote lyrics to the tune of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: “You’d best look aghast at the Sunshine Breakfast/ ’cause the washrooms are all closed for cleaning./ The yellowish dregs that they pour on your eggs/ will give Active Pass a new meaning.”)
B.C. Ferries finally ditched the Sunshine Breakfast in 2003, not because it was unpopular but because it had become a negative symbol, was bad for the brand — just as the sketchy Wi-Fi was.
Why was the Wi-Fi so unreliable? In short: It’s hard to provide Wi-Fi over water. Signals transmitted to vessels by shore-based radio frequently get blocked by other ships, or islands, or by the steel hulls of the ferries themselves. Distance and radio interference weaken signals. Heavy demand slows everything to a crawl. Maybe 40 or 50 passengers would try to log on when B.C. Ferries introduced Wi-Fi in 2010, but now it’s 900 per sailing.
Not only that, but B.C. Ferries was looking at having to buy new radios operated under rules that would result in even weaker signals to the ships. As for satellite and cellular solutions: Too much money, too little bandwidth. So, goodbye Wi-Fi, at least on the three routes (the other one affected is the Horseshoe Bay-Sunshine Coast run).
None of this will calm passengers who have come to expect free 24/7 connectivity anywhere on Earth as a God-given right, just like backup cameras and pre-shredded salad greens. I tried to explain this to my mother: “I know that you lived through 10 years of the Great Depression followed by six years of a global conflict that killed many of your friends, but what you fail to understand is that I just had to endure one hour and 35 minutes without Netflix.” What’s next, God, boils?
Jeez, what does it say about our sense of entitlement that we bleat like wounded goats when forced to put down our devices, lift our heads and look out the window at postcard-perfect scenery sliding by?
