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If you're a Telecom internet customer you may not realise that you can log into wireless internet hotspots at hotels, conference centres and Starbucks cafes the length of the country and surf the web for free. The service saved my bacon last week when a power outage at the Grand Chancellor hotel in Christchurch brought down the wired internet connection in my room.
A friend drove me to the Rydges Hotel where a Telecom hotspot operates. I didn't even get out of the car, just booted up my laptop outside the hotel, logged in and fired off the messages I urgently needed to send. Telecom says its hotspots will be free to Xtra customers to access until the end of the year. I hope it extends the offer indefinitely.
The internet industry has tried all sorts of ways to create a business model from Wi-fi. Coffee shops all over the world offer free Wi-fi to keep people sipping lattes and nibbling on biscotti longer. Hotels use it to lure in business travellers. It is particularly popular in airport lounges, where people want to email details of their travel plans before entering the cocoon of silence in the air.
While there are moves by companies and municipal councils to extend free Wi-fi coverage to entire cities, the municipal Wi-fi movement has taken a bit of a hit in the US, where a number of ambitious projects have stalled.
These potholes in the nation's wireless rollout of civic ambition, criticised by many as an improper use of tax dollars, are hardly the exception. For the road is getting bumpier for cities and the companies they have partnered with in a bid to blanket their streets with high-speed internet access at little or no cost to users, read an article published last week in the US publication BusinessWeek.
But as competition in the broadband market intensifies, there seems to be a more sustainable move towards offering free Wi-fi access as an extra for customers who already buy monthly broadband access. That model certainly underpins a deal struck last week between local tech start-up Tomizone and Australian internet provider iiNet, which last year sold Ihug to Vodafone for $42 million.
Tomizone allows people with wireless broadband connections to go into business as Wi-fi hotspot owners selling access to their connections for a daily fee. Tomizone handles the billing for the service, selling you a router with a piece of software on it which processes the customer's log-on and credit card payment.
Tomizone hopes to build a global network of entrepreneurial small business owners who can easily set up business, often at lower rates than commercial Wi-fi hotspots operating around them.
What iiNet is offering its Aussie customers is free access to Tomizone hotspots anywhere in the world. So lets say you have an iiNet broadband account and a Wi-fi router. You can buy a larger antenna to boost Wi-fi coverage around your house or business for around $100, download the software if you have a compatible DLink or Linksys wireless router and start broadcasting your signal. Tomizone charges from US$3 a day for access, or from US$15 a week. But iiNet customers will be able to use their log-in details to get free access. The hotspot owner still gets paid, a 50-50 revenue split with Tomizone and iiNet wears the cost of its customers using Wi-fi.
We see this as a way of extending an iiNet customer's home broadband connection. When travelling, customers will simply login with their iiNet credentials and away they go, said iiNets' Greg Bader last week.
For Tomizone it's a significant deal.
It's the first overseas beachhead for us, though we're talking to many other telcos and ISPs about repeating the model elsewhere, said Tomizone founder Steve Simms.
The model promises to monetise Wi-fi usage in a sustainable way, but Tomizone will only be as good as the size of its coverage footprint, which at the moment is small. There are 22 hotspots listed on Tomizone.com for Auckland, most at Esquire coffee shops, and just four in Wellington. There's only one listed for Sydney. It's very early days then, but Wi-fi technology has become standardised enough for the non-technical to use, which could see a network start to form relatively quickly.
