Despite North Korea traditionally being one of the least Wi-Fi friendly countries, its main internet provider appears to have put a router at the international departure area of Pyongyang's airport, Eric Talmadge, AP’s Pyongyang bureau chief since 2013, wrote.
The service is only available or better say visible, to travelers who have gone through the customs area and arrived at the departures lobby. Talmadge, who has traveled to North Korea and back dozens of times, said he, surprisingly enough, noticed a familiar three-bar sign at the lobby while he was expecting his return flight and decided to give it a try.
Having paid two dollars for allegedly 30 mins of internet surfing he was hardly shocked to find the password an attended had given him on a slip of paper did not work. Nor did it start working when an amiable staffer from the internet service area rushed to help.
What was comforting indeed, is that Talmadge knew perfectly well that airport Wi-Fi, the way it operates around the globe, is more "aspirational" than "functioning", since it outright exposes devices to hackers’ attacks.
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Still, according to the journalist, the whole story bears pretty much resemblance to, for instance, newly-maintained but half-working ATM or coffee vending machines, with developers having rendered it absolutely impossible to make use of them:
"Despite its own instructions, for the life of me, I couldn't find a slot on the machine to insert my money or any indication of how much it would cost," Talmadge wrote, not, though, dismissing the idea that the airport Wi-Fi could have been in a test mode.
North Korea has recently allowed more citizens to access smartphones and an isolated intranet, enabling citizens who can afford it to communicate in a novel way and thus giving the dictatorship new opportunities to monitor its people and boost its powers. Meanwhile, the Internet is left to be a prerogative of the select few, or the trusted elite that is allowed to surf the Internet with relative freedom.
