Upgrade column: Tech Hotspots and lukewarm airports

It's about time the airports serving the world's most high-tech cities added a bit of their own gee-whizz, says Steve Ranger, because at the moment they're not all doing a great job.

I've spend the last two months identifying the world's most important cities for technology innovation, which online publication silicon.com has dubbed Tech Hotspots. Sadly many of the airports serving these great cities are lagging behind in the innovation stakes.

For the recent Tech Hotspots project silicon.com editors assembled a crack team of judges from around the globe - from London to San Francisco, from Bangalore to Sydney and beyond, including CIOs, entrepreneurs, academics, lawyers and even journalists.

This group came up with a list of the 20 cities of worldwide importance in terms of innovation, development and use or manufacture of enterprise technology.

To make it onto the Tech Hotspots list a city has to be judged to be a leader according to a number of criteria. As well as being renowned for creativity and entrepreneurship, we also looked at the quality of the local infrastructure. You can find out more about the 20 cities on the list in the Tech Hotspot special report which features an interactive map allowing you to navigate through each of the profiles, which include details of why each location made it onto the list, and also some handy hints for the business traveller.

So are the airports of the world's leading Tech Hotspots contributing to the rankings of the cities they support - or holding them back? A quick check on the rankings of the main airports of the three highest ranking hotspots suggests there is still a way to go.

Silicon Valley's main airport SFO gets a decent rating of 6.1 out of 10 on the atlarge.com scale (and came first in the silicon.com countdown), with a number of the posters recommending the airline lounges (which is fine if you are travelling in business or better).

But clearly the seasoned tech travellers using SFO think wi-fi is now such a given that they shouldn't even have to pay for it. "I think it should be free in places like San Francisco," wrote one poster.

Rather less impressive with a current score of 3.4 is Bangalore airport, which came second on the Tech Hotspots list.

"Hot, sweaty and rammed with people," said on disgruntled traveller who couldn't get access to the wi-fi at all. "It's poky and the chairs in departures are covered in stains and the announcements are pretty hard to hear. To be honest I can't see anyone getting too much work done here."

On the plus side - there's a new Bangalore airport open now. On the downside it's much further out of town, meaning even more time in the Bangalore traffic.

And as for the third on the list, London, its largest airport Heathrow has a mixed rating, scoring 5.6 on the atlarge.com index. It will be interesting to see whether Terminal 5 will boost or reduce that score in the long term. Again, the seasoned (and it seems increasingly militant) travellers whizzing through all seem to want their wi-fi free.

"Free, good quality wi-fi, like comfy seating, will be a winner with passengers who have too many bad things to say about London's airports, and not even cost that much to provide," said one.

Sad to say but it seems that many of the airports are spoiling the high-tech reputation of the cities they serve. Tech Hotspots with lukewarm airports. It's just not good enough.

Steve Ranger is the editor of silicon.com.