If you are still paying for wifi access by the hour on your credit card it could be time to change, says Mark Prigg.
If one technology has revolutionised the computer industry more than any other in the past two years, it is wifi.Every laptop and desktop machine comes with wireless capabilities as standard and it is now virtually unheard of to find a hotel or conference room without it. Walk into any airport lounge or coffee shop and the chances are you’ll have several wireless networks to choose from, the only difference being the logo attached to the product offering.
Paul Allen, editor of Computeractive magazine, says that 2007 was the year that wifi reached critical mass. “I think the technology became easy enough for anyone to use, and also became incredibly common around hotels, airports and city centres.”
But although business travellers have been among the main beneficiaries of wifi proliferation, convenience comes at a price: literally. With so many different hotspot providers, you can end up paying through the nose to work in airports, hotels and cafés around the globe.
Take airports, for example. They can each have several different operators, all with different price plans and payment methods. These range from hourly vouchers (BT Openzone would charge £6 per hour for these) to monthly subscription packages for hotspot aggregation services such as iPass, Boingo or BT Openzone again, costing £20-30 per month. So
which should you choose?
The key to finding the right wifi service is to work out how often you intend to use it, and where. If you are passing through the same airports time and time again, it’s worth checking online to see which services are supported there (hotspot finder jiwire.com is a good starting point). Also bear in mind where you tend to sit in the airport – wifi is a location-specific phenomenon.
These choices can also cause headaches for IT departments, as data costs are hard to evaluate when people buy hourly or daily wifi access, which is charged back via their expense accounts and so never appears on the IT department’s budget. Up to 70 per cent of broadband expenses can be hidden in this “black budget”, according to recent research by Gartner.
So although it might look like you are saving money by simply buying access when you need it, cumulatively you might be running up quite a bill, particularly when many hotels and conference centres charge up to £10 per hour for wifi access.
Of course, to save money by a monthly subscription, you have to pick a provider which has sufficient coverage in the places you visit, otherwise you’ll be paying twice – once for the subscription, and again for the hourly access needed for those places where the provider has no coverage.
Arguably the biggest company in the wifi aggregation space is iPass, which gives users access to over 90,000 hotspots in 70 countries, including more than 1,290 in London. It’s aimed at the corporate user, and includes partners such as BT Openzone, the Cloud, T-Mobile and hotel provider iBahn.
Piero De Paoli of iPass says: “We actually began by offering customers a pay-per-use model, but we soon found they preferred the subscription service. One of the key benefits of our service is integration, so we can work with whatever secure networking systems a company already has. Subscription also allows a company to estimate their costs more effectively, as they know exactly how much they will be paying every month.”
Although the company refuses to reveal prices, claiming they are all calculated on a per-company basis, its UK resellers offer the basic service for £24.99 per month. However, the iPass software is customised for each client, and can also work with a range of access methods, from wifi and 3G to virtual private-networking systems. The company has also created a useful online calculator for estimating the cost of wireless access, available at ipass.com. For companies managing hundreds of employees, it is an excellent choice.
Another big player is Boingo, which claims to be the world’s biggest aggregator, with access to more than 100,000 hotspots around the world. It is aimed mainly at the SME and private traveller, and prices start at around £21 per month for an unlimited global service. It offers largely the same partners as iPass but without the integration services, making it a better choice for the smaller company.
There is also the option of signing up with an individual provider such as BT Openzone or The Cloud directly, and if you are always travelling to the same place this can be a reasonable option, especially if data usage is minimal. For instance, with The Cloud, access can cost from £4 per hour, although with subscription packages from £6.99 per month they are often a better deal.
T-Mobile’s costs are more expensive at £20 per month (£10 for T-Mobile subscribers) or £5 per hour on a pay-as-you-go basis. However, the problem with individual providers is that you are dependent on either being in range of one of their hotspots, or able to roam as a result of one of the relationships they have with another hotspot provider. BT does also offers travel vouchers giving 500 minutes for £28 in the US and for £40 in Europe, but again the access is limited to just a few providers (although BT has signed up a large percentage of hotels to the scheme).
It’s also worth talking to your mobile phone network to see if wifi roaming can be added – this will often work out far cheaper than signing up to a stand-alone service. Several hotspot operators, such as T-Mobile, are also signed up with several aggregation services, so it’s advisable to shop around.
Alongside these commercial wifi companies are smaller, innovative companies like Spain’s FON, which are trying to offer free wifi. Funded by Google and Skype, and partnered in the UK with BT, FON’s premise is simple – users donate some of the bandwidth of their home or office wifi connection to the service, and in return can use any other FON hotspot for free. FON makes money by charging non-subscribers for access to the network of hotspots, and the private and public areas of your connection are kept separate and secure.
It’s a fantastic idea, but the UK at least is stuck in something of a chicken-and-egg situation, as there simply aren’t enough FON hotspots to make it worthwhile.However, BT says the strategy will become key to its roll out of wifi in the UK. Gavin Patterson, BT’s consumer chief, says: “We have built a public wifi network and 12 wireless cities already, but today we are saying to customers, ‘Let’s build a wifi community together with FON, which covers everywhere and serves everyone’.”
The success of wifi has also spawned a slew of similar wireless technologies, of which the most impressive is wimax. In a nutshell wimax is like wifi, but on a much bigger scale. Whereas a wifi network covers a few hundred feet and effectively links you to your wireless modem to give you internet connectivity via an ISP, wimax will work over an entire city and entirely replace your ISP. The technology is backed by Intel, and 2008 is set to see the majority of laptops getting wimax capabilities built in. Indeed, the first commercial trial of wimax in the UK will cover the whole of Milton Keynes, offering broadband speeds for prices comparable to standard broadband charges.Mike Read, CEO of Freedom4, which is operating the service, says: “We have had great success with our trials of wimax in the Milton Keynes area and partnering with ConnectMK allows us to reach the wider community.”
One of the key benefits of wimax for companies is they don’t have to install hardware in the office, and can get high-speed coverage whenever they are in a covered area. Read adds: “We can also provide services in areas where traditional ADSL broadband access is not feasible, giving residents and businesses a cost-effective alternative to access the latest in internet connectivity.”
Paul Allen at Computeractive agrees: “Wimax doesn’t compete with wifi, but is set to make a big impact for companies.It is effectively an alternative to cabled broadband connections, and for a lot of people could make getting broadband speeds far easier.”
With the amazing uptake in wifi, and its appearance in almost every home appliance, it seems that wireless technology really is here to stay. However, actually getting online once you’re in range of a hotspot can still open you up to exorbitant prices. But with the huge number of companies now competing in the wifi service market, it really is worth shopping around.
Visit btopenzone.com, boingo.com, ipass.com, thecloud.net, t-mobile.co.uk, fon.com.
Mark Prigg is the Science and Technology Correspondent of the London Evening Standard
