For-pay services

For-pay services
Freenets are cool. And, although we think that freenets are an awesome concept,
if you’ve got an essential business document to e-mail or a PowerPoint
presentation that you’ve absolutely got to download from the company
server before you get to your meeting, you might not want to rely solely on
the generosity of strangers. You might even be willing to pay to get a good,
reliable, secure connection to the Internet for these business (or important
personal) purposes.
And trust us: Someone out there is thinking about how he can help you with
that need. In fact, a bunch of companies are focusing on exactly that business.
It’s the nature of capitalism, right? You’ve got a need that you’re willing
to part with some hard-earned cash to have requited. And some company is
going to come along, fulfill that need, and separate you from your money.
The concluding sections of the chapter talk about a few of these companies,
but for now, we just talk in generalities. Commercial hot spot providers are
mainly focused on the business market, providing access to mobile workers
and road-warrior types. And many of these providers also offer relatively inexpensive
plans (by using either prepaid calling cards or pay-by-the-use models)
that you might use for non-business (your personal) connectivity. (At least if
you’re like us, and you can’t go a day without checking your mail or reading
DBR — www.dukebasketballreport.com — even when on vacation.)
Unless you’re living in a city or town right near a hot spot provider, you’re probably
not going to be able to pick up a hot spot as your primary ISP, although in
some places (often smaller towns), ISPs are using Wi-Fi as the primary pipe to
their customers’ homes. You can expect to find for-pay hot spot access in a lot
of areas outside the home. The most common include the following:
Hotel lobbies and rooms
Coffee shops and Internet cafes
Airport gates and lounges
Office building lobbies
Train stations
Meeting facilities
Basically, anywhere that folks armed with a laptop or a handheld computer
might find themselves, there’s a potential for a hot spot operator to build a
business.
296 Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
Opening up to your neighbors
We’re not talking about group therapy or wild
hot tub parties. Wireless networks can carry
through walls, across yards, and potentially
around the neighborhood. Although wireless
LANs were designed from the start for in-building
use, the technology can be used in outdoors
settings. For example, most college campuses
are now wired with dozens or hundreds of wireless
access points so that students, staff, and
professors can access the Internet from just
about anywhere on campus. At UC San Diego,
for example, freshmen are outfitted with wireless
personal digital assistants (PDAs) to schedule
classes, send e-mails, and instant messages,
and even find their friends at the student center
(by using a locator program written by a student).
Many folks are adapting this concept
when it comes to access in their neighborhood,
setting up community wireless LANs.
Some creators of these community LANs have
taken the openness of the Internet to heart and
have opened up their access points to any and
all takers. There’s even an Internet subculture
with Web sites and chalk markings on sidewalks
identifying these open access points. In other
areas, where broadband access is scarce,
neighbors pool money to buy a T1 or other
business-class, high-speed Internet line to
share it wirelessly.
We think that both of these concepts make a lot
of sense, but we do have one warning: Many
Internet service providers (ISPs) don’t like the
idea of you sharing your Internet connection
without them getting a piece of the action.
Beware that you might have to pay for a more
expensive commercial ISP line. Before you
share your Internet connection, check your
ISP’s Terms of Service (TOS) or look at the listing
of wireless-friendly ISPs on the Electronic
Frontier Foundation’s Web page (www.eff.
org). The same is true of DSL and cable modem
providers. Your usage agreement with them
basically says that you won’t do this, and they’re
starting to charge high-use fees to lines that
have extranormal traffic (that is, those lines that
seem like there are a bunch of people on the
broadband line sharing the connection).
Pretty soon, you’ll even be able to plug into a Wi-Fi network on an airplane.
Boeing and Cisco have been teaming up to get wireless Internet access on
passenger planes. In fact, they’ve already got one plane — a Lufthansa 747
that makes regular trips between Frankfurt, Germany and Washington, DC —
already outfitted with the system. The system connects to a satellite ISP and
gives passengers a high-speed connection (up to 1 Mbps) in any seat on the
plane (even back in 52b, that awful middle seat by the lavatory!). Here’s a
cool aside about this system: On the inaugural flight, a reporter wrote and
submitted his story entirely online while flying on the plane.
The single biggest issue that’s been holding back the hot spot industry so far
(keeping it as a huge future trend instead of a use-it-anywhere-today reality)
has been the issue of roaming. As of this writing, no one hot spot operator
has anything close to ubiquitous coverage. Instead, dozens of different hot
spot operators, of different sizes, operate in competition with each other. As
a user, perhaps a sales person who’s traveling across town to several different
clients in one day, you might find yourself running into hot spots from
three or four different hot spot providers — and needing accounts from three
or four separate providers to get online with each.
This is a lot different, of course, from the cell phone industry, in which you
can pretty much take your phone anywhere and make calls. The cell phone
providers have some elaborate roaming arrangements in place that allow
them to bill each other (and in the end, bill you, the user) for these calls. Hot
spot service providers haven’t quite reached this point. However, here are a
couple of trends that will help bring about some true hot spot roaming:
Companies, such as Boingo Wireless, are entering the market. Boingo
(founded by Sky Dayton, who also founded the huge ISP EarthLink),
doesn’t operate any of its own hot spots but instead has partnered with
a huge range of other hot spot operators from little mom-and-pop hot
spot operators to big operations such as Wayport. Boingo provides all
the billing and account management for end users. Thus, a Boingo customer
can go to any Boingo partner’s hot spot, log on, and get online. (We
talk about both Boingo and Wayport in more detail later in the chapter.)
Cell phone companies are getting into the hot spot business. Led by
T-Mobile, cell phone companies are beginning to buy into the hot spot
concept, setting up widespread networks of hot spots in their cellular
phone territories. Although these networks aren’t yet ubiquitous —
the coverage isn’t anywhere close to that of the cellular phone networks
yet — it is getting better by the day.
Besides improving coverage and solving the roaming problem, commercial
hot spot providers are also beginning to look at solutions that provide a
higher grade of access — offering business class hot spot services, in other
words. For example, they are exploring special hot spot access points and
related gear that can offer different tiers of speeds (you could pay more to get
a faster connection) or that can offer secure connections to corporate networks
(so that you can safely log onto the office network to get work files).
In the next sections of this chapter, we talk about some of the most prominent
commercial hot spot providers operating in the United States. We’re not
going to spend any time talking about the smaller local hot spot providers
out there, although many of them are hooking up with companies like Boingo.
We’re not down on these smaller providers, but we’re aiming for the maximum
bang for our writing buck. So if you’ve got a local favorite that meets
your needs, go for it!