Why do some cities deny visitors connectivity?
How hospitable is your city to the visitor? Until recently, the answer to this question would have been based fundamentally, on the personality of its inhabitants, transportation, ease of moving around, the number of hotels, and even the weather. Today, as the second decade of the 21st century comes to an end, a city is measured as much as anything by its connectivity.
Take Dubai, a city where I found myself earlier this week with time to walk around and photograph it: a showcase for the future with its huge avenues, its impressive skyscrapers and its efficient and spotless public transport, the city is certainly very attractive… but also highly dysfunctional thanks to the omnipotent power of telecommunications companies whose backward-looking practices undermine its appeal to the visitor. If you travel to Dubai and are paying your own telephone charges, forget about using your smartphone, because the country still operates as Europe did not so long ago, applying abusive roaming rates. At the same time, acquiring a local SIM card requires jumping through hoops, at least compared to other cities, basically because the authorities want the whole process to be traceable.
If, in a bid to avoid those hefty roaming charges, you switch your phone to airplane mode and try to operate via WiFi, you soon come up against the combined power of the operators and the government’s resolve to monitor what people are doing online. Public WiFi hotspots only offer a connection if you have a local phone number where you can obtain the PIN required to activate WiFi. Without it, you won’t get past the home page. This system provides very good connectivity… precisely to those who don’t need it, because they can already use their telephone connection, while it prevents the hapless visitor from doing so. An alternative is to connect from the lobby of a hotel, but in a city not designed for walking, this can be something of a challenge.
Once you’ve left your hotel, as a rule, moving around the city isn’t a problem. As the saying goes, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Except, of course, it’s not always that simple. I was in Dubai for the start of the weekend, while at the same time, a local Food Fair had attracted a lot of interest, resulting in gridlock throughout many of the city’s broad avenues were gridlocked. Public transport offers a good alternative and is easy to use, except when you want to see what station you need, where to change between the metro and tram or what route to take from the station to your hotel or apartment, and you realize that because you can’t connect, you can’t use maps or access the public transport system’s information page. And of course, without a connection, you can’t use Uber or Careem. Hail a taxi on the street? Good luck with that one.
In short, Dubai is not a hospitable place for the visitor, even though it would cost the local authorities there nothing to provide a basic connection. The infrastructure is there and it’s possible to connect just about anywhere… except for those who most need to. It’s like being taken back in time to traveling in the days before the smartphone: not exactly the impression one expects when visiting “the city of the future”. In this case at least, the city doesn’t work.
City authorities looking to provide visitors with a good user experience need to see things from the perspective of those visitors. Because Dubai has failed to do that, it makes staying there a pain; and for no reason. I would be interested to hear the experiences of other visitors to the city, as well as about other cities that needlessly make life hard for non-residents.
(En español, aquí)
