WiFi in the Wild
Much noise has been made in the last year or two about WiFi as a revenue stream. On the one hand is T-Mobile HotSpot, the 500-pound gorilla of paid wireless access. I don’t know if they’re making any money, but they’ve got access points HotSpots all over the place. Borders, Starbucks, and Kinkos are among the many places with HotSpots… over 4500 at the time writing. The problem, like so many new services, is pricing. As of April 14, 2004, T-Mobile offers 4 pricing plans:
Unlimited Annual - $29.99 per month, if you sign a 12 month contract.
Unlimited Monthly - $39.99 per month, with no contract
Day Pass - $9.99 for 24 hours. This might be a good deal, except it’s for a consecutive 24 period.
Pay As You Go - $6.00 per hour, minimum connect time 1 hour ($0.10 per minute after the first hour).
Granted, the Unlimited Annual may not be a bad plan if you travel all the time. Most of us, I suspect, don’t want to pay as much for mobile WiFi as we do for our home broadband connections, as we are likely to use it much less. I could see myself buying a Day Pass, if I were in a pinch. For someone who only wants 15 minutes of service to check email, both the Day Pass and the Pay as you Go option seem a bit high.
On the other hand is free WiFi. Panera Bread Co. is the best known example (at least to me) of a company that offers free WiFi as a service to customers, and as a way to bring in customers. Like many others, I’ve commented on them before. Many people hope that this will become the prevailing model of public WiFi service. in January, Best Western announced that they will be offering free broadband (a mix of wired and WiFi) in all of their hotels before year end. Once this is complete, I will certainly give Best Western a higher consideration when choosing a hotel. Also in the mix, of course, is wardriving, but for this discussion I’m more interested in intentional public WiFi, and WiFi as a revenue stream.
While I certainly hope to see more businesses take the lead of Panera and Best Western, today I read about a promising third option, from McDonalds (you want WiFi with that?) of all places. Via Scripting News, The New York Times reports that 13,000 McDonalds restaurants will be offering WiFi at the rate of $2.95 for two hours. Wow. I recall reading about a WiFi experiment at several McDonalds in Manhattan several months ago. Guess it went well. It will be very interesting to see how active T-Mobile’s ubiquitous HotSpots are once McDonalds super-sizes cheap WiFi.
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