The Turkish Airlines Lounge in Istanbul is by all means one of the coolest places to stay at any airport around the globe. Well at least it was so far. Apart from a nice interior one thing that is obviously absolutely crucial to me and many other business travelers is good Internet connectivity. And this is more and more difficult to get in that lounge.
While there is Wi-Fi in the lounge, OpenVPN and IPSec connectivity is blocked. No idea why but I’m probably not the only business traveler who is more than unhappy about this. At least I can use an SSH tunnel VPN that they (forgot?) to block to get my data safely through the network. Another option that has worked so far in the lounge is to tether my PC via a mobile device and one of the cellular networks there to the Internet. Unfortunately both times I’ve been there recently, Turkcell and Vodafone Turkey failed miserably.
Outside the lounge at the gates, both networks worked well so I decided to leave. Perhaps one of the companies involved in this cares and does something about the situation next time. Would be nice…
I’ve had the same experience you write about….but not all the access points are configured similarly. On the upper floor the experience is as you describe but on the lower floor the access point near the food service area is not blocked and I’ve used it successfully for VPN session. There is still a challenge on the amount of bandwidth available and the network is massively overloaded.