Wi-Fi Industry Basics

One poorly understood characteristic of the hotspot industry is fragmentation. As noted earlier, Wi-Fi has a range of 100-500 feet. This means that in the future, as you walk down the street past a café, a bookstore and then a hotel, you might encounter three different hotspots.

Like the early days of cellular and ATMs, there is a lack of unified roaming in Wi-Fi that holds back the industry. Far fewer people used ATM cards when they were only accepted at the issuing bank’s locations. Similarly, cellular adoption only took off when people could roam from area to area and were not required to change phones and providers.

Wi-Fi users today (lacking a solution like Boingo^®) are forced to either maintain accounts with each of the hotspot operators they encounter in their travels or type in their credit card number each time they want to connect. As hotspots proliferate, so will fragmentation, compounding this problem. Until there is unified roaming across all hotspots, industry growth will be hampered.

Universal roaming is one of Boingo’s missions.

Difficult user experience »