I landed at the Bangalore International Airport the other night wanted to get on a Wifi Network, so I could ‘Whatsapp’ my friends who were supposed to pick me up (I didn’t have a local SIM to call them.) I hoped Bangalore, being the IT city and Silicon Valley of India would have free wifi and I wasn’t disappointed as I found one provided by Tata Indicom.

I connected to the wifi network and was redirected to a login page, as shown below. This is where the problems started.

The steps shown in above screenshot seem simple enough, but I had no local phone Number to get a text message at and I didn’t have International roaming to get a text on my US number. In any case the system only Accepted Indian Numbers.

I then clicked on ‘International Roaming Users’ option in the login page but the system required me to already have a connection with one of the service providers given in the two dropdown boxes, as seen in below screenshot. I didn’t have an account with those providers, so it was another dead end.

Clicking on ‘Quick Access/TIBB Users’ took me to a login page for Tata Indicom Broadband users. No account and no luck again.

Finally, I clicked on ‘To Buy Online’ and thought of buying some time. This lead to the screen shown above. I’m not sure why anybody would want to buy a 3-day package for the airport. Also all fields are mandatory and the country field is extremely mandatory (with a red star)! I selected a package and the country dropdown allowed me to select USA, but once again dead end as the system only Accepted Indian numbers! Aaaaaargh.

What a fail, Bangalore.