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Is WiFi Access Worth $10/hour?
Roland Piquepaille writes "This special report from CNET News.com carries an eloquent subtitle: 'Wireless expectations rose in 2003, but growth was hobbled by security concerns and unproven business models.' It's much worse than you think and I'm going to tell you why Wi-Fi will still not be broadly used in 2004 in this column. Technology columnists are usually looking at their own part of the world, in Silicon Valley or on the East Coast of the U.S. And obviously, their opinions are largely biased. Our world is much bigger than that. My arguments are based on real-world examples, both in Greece and in Paris. They're also based on costs of access. Paying $10 an hour for Wi-Fi access is almost twice as you pay for a movie. Would you pay $20 to see a movie? Probably not. So will you pay $10 to use a Wi-Fi connection for one hour? Certainly not."
perhaps, if the account that you pay for at StarBucks would at least allow for implementation of a RADIUS server and authentication by certificates, then perhaps the $10 and hour would be somewhat warranted. In the meantime, however, this just ends up being a factor of greed on the part of StarBucks and T-Mobile. Really, this should be a value adding benifit for the people who frequent StarBucks and pay $4 for a mocha not a service above and beyond the coffee.
Oh, and have you ever been to a hotspot and tried to get some information from the workers there? Not to be rude, as I'm sure that they are proficient at making a Latte, but would it hurt to at least tell them a couple things about wireless networks? Everytime I ask them anything, I get shrugs and answers such as "I don't know. They just have a guy come in and check on that [the access point] every now and then". Note, these are not complicated questions either. I ask if this is an A,B, or G network and the barista's eyes glaze over.
Oh well, at least free hotspots are much more plentiful in my hometown than the author of the article alludes to in France. Hey, word is they are even setting up the entire town next to me for a citywide WiFi network...
No I wouldn't, but several years ago when intenet access in Japan was a novelty a bar in my neighbourhood started offering internet access via a single PC on the bar top - cost Y1,000 per 30 minutes, which is give or take US$10 per 1/2 hour. People used it, but the bar eventually went bust. A bad business model? I'm sure people voting with their wallets will briing the price to a sensible level - everything's expensive at first.
Just my Y2 worth...
I run a few hotspots around Minneapolis. The best practice I have found it allow people to buy chunks of time, allowing them to use this time whenever they are in the hotspot. Allowing people to buy 10 hours for $30.00, and letting them use it over the span of 3 months has worked well for me.
TruePunk | Games
WiFi Hot-Spots in airports, cafes, etc. *beg* for pricing in a per-MB model.
$2 for the first megabyte (minimum $2) and $0.03 per additional megabyte...That way, people who go in and do a lot of work (downloading Linux ISOs, etc. over the corporate connection) pay more for it, and the people who use it to check their e-mail, pay almost nothing.
WiFi hotspots are one of the few places where a bandwidth-based billing model works.
In a hotel in France, they wanted over $20 for 24h. WiFi aceess. Guess what? I said no thanks and used my modem to get my mail. That cost me about $1 for the hotel-overcharged local phone call.
But a hotel with free WiFi will get me renting their room.
And if I go into a cafe, I will choose one with free WiFi over the other one next door.
WiFi enabling a place like a cafe costs almost nothing. If they want to charge for the access, it costs much more to set up. That makes no sense. If I was a cafe or restaurant owner, I wouldn't hesitate a minute: buy a $100 (or less) access point, a router or firewall if it's not already there, hook it up to my existing ADSL or cable line, and let it be used for free and attract customers.
So, is this the amount I can sue wardrivers/bandwidth thieves for when they hop onto my network?
I run an unencrypted unsecured WLAN...or at least I use to.
:-)
Anything important enough to warent encryption did so between the machine and its server, so that was never a problem...if someone sees other files flying around, who cares.
As for unsecured, that too was something I was cool with. If someone needed to use my lan, I was happy to oblige...I have my airport on the 3rd floor of my home, and it got pretty good coverage in my neighborhood if I just aimed my iBook just right.
BUT, I started getting HUGE downloads that would slow down my entire network, and thats when I got a little irked. It wasn't friends that showed up and pulled in front of the house to check email on their way from point A to B, I think some kiddie was downloading huge warez or porn vids through it. I had the major trading softwares firewalled at the main router, so I wasn't worried about that.
But the fact these people got greedy ended up pissing me off to the point I started filtering via Mac Address.
So, if you don't want to pay -- thats cool for most of us. Just don't be a greedy bastard and you might end up being allowed to use these networks for a bit longer
BTW -- to keep this on topic for the rest of this posting, 2 bigger coffee shops in my area (within 10 minutes walking distance) have free internet access as well. Its an advertised service and one of the reasons folks come in and stay 3 hours. If small shops like this can do it and not charge a penny, companies like Starbucks should be able to do it for free as well (then again, Starbucks doesn't care about bringing in customers...the fact that its there will kill off 70% of the coffee shops in its vacinity because most people would rather go with a brand name than quality).
For general wandering on the net paying that kind of money doesn't make sense, but for anyone travelling around, it could well.
If the charge increment is less than a full hour, a 15 minute block would cost $2.50. I'd happily pay that. My laptop could suck down my mail, upload off-line written mails and still let me check a few news sites, all for $2.50.
Sure, I'd rather pay $5 an hour or less, but these things do cost, and the mentality of "the net must be free!" really can't go on forever. What I'm hoping for are *reasonable* charges for things in the future.
Anyone who uses the net for anything related to a business use shouldn't see an hourly cost as being bad. At $10/hr they might not see as much use as $5/hr, and if thats the case then the market place is going to the give propriators a whack on their heads, won't it.
In my case, I'd likely use a $5/hr system several times more than a $10/hr system, but if I'm in Podunk nowhere $2.50 for 15 minutes isn't going to seem too bad.
Out here in the UK, BT charges 15/hour for an hour of 802.11b connectivity for their "OpenZone" service. They cite Microsoft Windows as a system requirement but you can get connectivity in Linux using IP-over-DNS, with the added benefit that it's absolutely free. I'd probably have willing to pay a reasonable amount for their service, but as long as they refuse to support Linux, people are just going to continue to freeload with IP-over-DNS.
I'm curious about availability at major universities. Here at the University of Central Florida we have free access in most of the newer buildings and several outdoor areas. The coverage is growing and notable currently covered areas include the bookstore (which is run by Barnes and Noble and has the obligatory Starbucks), the Math and Physics building, the Student Union (along with areas surrouding it) and Engineering. Do other schools have widespread access for students and faculty?
Daniel
Aerospace Engineering major
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
One of the most efficient deployments, in terms of billing, is as a loss leader. By this I mean where you deploy it for free, with the hopes that the increase in traffic (foot traffic) will more than make up for the cost. This model works for coffee shops, hotels, some restaurants, and perhaps even housing or office complexes.
Example (and shameless plug):
I have set up just such a network in the plaza where my office is located, Lake Anne (in Reston, Virginia). We have a T1, and have wired up four of the restaurants with access points. We are using 802.11b, no encryption, no signups, just come out and connect. The restaurants pay us for the access and to maintain the equipment, which goes a long way to defraying to cost of the T1. The restaurants have "WiFi Zone" stickers in the windows, and we are trying to get some local press coverage.
Most days, I see at least a few people with their laptops in the various restuarants (one of them is, in fact, a coffee shop). I can hardly wait for the spring, since the access extends to the benches surrounding the dock (the plaza is at one end of a small lake).
For the curious, we use a combination of Netgear wireless routers, Apple Airport Extremes, and a FreeBSD gateway/firewall (with a Sangoma T1 adapter in it-- no router necessary). Our F.A.Q. (a work in progress) covers the most common questions people have to hook up, and the restaurants all have a printout of it just in case . The best part is, it works!
Ok, a couple of things. /OT)
/hour for internet access. It might of have sounded good in a board room, but it's the wrong way to think. Let me explain.
1. Community groups have essentially killed the market in a lot of cities. If someone can get it free, they won't pay. These are legitimate organizations, many federal non-profits - regardless of what Dvorak might think.
www.personaltelco.net is quite active in Portland, OR. If I were to step out on a limb, I would say that any corp wanting to unwire the downtown area would fail because of the personaltelco nodes that are already active.
(now some 12 year old nUb will "hack" the ptp wiki and brag about it on some irc channel, grr
2. The "linksys community network", ssid = default, no wep, etc. Whatever. Basically, it's free and the "pay for" model isn't. Besides. A lot of users would just go "wow, [mah emahil | AIM] is working" and be happy.
3. Starbucks/Tmobile et al think "profit" as charging $X
Most "regulars" (read "the majority of people who will buy stuff from you") will migrate to free wifi if that is what they are looking for. You can still hook in the occasional out of towner BUT they aren't your bread and butter.
And just to make this even more simplistic and understandable.
What do you sell in a coffee shop? Yes. Coffee.
Do you make a profit on coffee? Yes. I hope so, at $5 for a cup of crappy burnt beans.
If you give a reason for people to stay, will they buy more coffee (remember, you make a profit on coffee)? Yes. They will.
Will this increase your profits? Yeah. Of course.
Some companies realize this - and also realize that if you want to force people to get access with a purchase, that is pretty easy too. I think it's "buy a big mac, get net access" in McDonalds right now. They realize how they can make this profitable (although IMHO, the location is kind of wrong, sort of like selling mayonaise in a sex shop, but then again I haven't been to a McDonalds in 5 years)
Sure there is a niche market in airports and the such, but the average business isn't in an airport, is it?
Starbucks should be paying tmobile etc for the amount of time customers spend online, not the other way around.
4. If a company that offers wireless internet is not profitable, it is because of piss poor management and pissing away of company funds on stuff not essential to the business.
An access point costs roughly $200 to implement (an AP, a nocat box, or running some other authentication/payment scheme) and the man hours to install it. After that, $90 a month charge for the DSL/cable. Probably less than that.
When an AP is so cheap to implement, it is kind of hard to not make a profit even using these "pay" services.
BTW, the guy who runs www.seattlewireless.com is a scumbag who "resells" free services and IMHO should be dragged into the street, shot and hung from a lamp post. He's using the name of the community organization that sets up free nodes and making money for stealing nodedb's and mapquest's maps.
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I can connect to 4 APs from my downtown office and I don't have one myself.
One of those belongs to a restaurant for their patrons and I eat there frequently, so I am a patron - the others are other businesses in the building with open APs on the outside of their firewalls.
Nuff sed.
It's a lot cheaper for a bar or restaurant to provide free WiFi than to subscribe to a commercial cable TV or satellite sports provider, but I've never had the owner of a sports bar try to charge me to watch a Bucs game.
Sometimes I like to go to a bar to watch games that aren't being shown where I live; I'm not such a big fan that I want to watch out-of-area teams often enough to pay for one of those expensive "sports pass" satellite deals, and besides, it's often nice to sit with other people who enjoy the game instead of with my wife, who leaves the room when I put on a football game and barely tolerates baseball.
Obvously bar owners figure sports TV is worth the cost. There's no question that it brings in business -- including mine now and then. I'm not sure enough people have wireless-equipped laptops or PDAs for free wireless to pay off quite yet in most parts of the world for establishments that put it in, but that day will come.
I said all of this in a NewsForge article last May, BTW.
- Robin
Ok, so you go into the shop, get a $5 cup of coffee. Letsay the avg person spends 15-30 minutes in the store actually drinking it.
If a person spends an hour or so at the store, how many of them actually buy a second cup? At the local starbucks (sanjose), there's always a crowd outfront in the evenings. They're there every friday/saturday night, from dusk till dawn it seems.
If you put in Wi-Fi, do you think the people will buy 2-3 cups of coffee for the 2-3hrs they may spend online?
It all comes down to $$/hr. Either $10/hr (for 1cup every 30minutes) or 1hr online (at $10/hr).
I personally wouldn't want people buying one cup of coffee and then surfing the web for free over the span of 2hours. Its like 'window shopping', but in this case your in my shop with no intention of buying (other than a 'token' cup). Or possibly no cup at all.
Ok, so I haven't shaved today, either, but I did write up a little Cool Use For Perl on PerlMonks called Expresso Login.
If you've been to Starbucks or Borders Books in Southern CA or South Texas, you very well may have seen me.
I recommend Borders -- especially if you ever need a reference book while working...just walk over and get one, bring it back, sip Latte, work/surf, and enjoy.
The only problem I've had was the onset of Christmas music prior to Thanksgiving weekend (!).
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Exactly, just like cell phones.
I remember back in the 80's when my Mom's boss had a cell phone. He paid something like $400/month for it but he made millions. It was a productivity tool.
Zoom ahead 15 years. Now every punk kid at the mall has a cell phone and it costs them $40/month. They use them to goof off and keep in touch with friends.
WiFi will be the same. It will just take a few years to get cheap. Not as many years as cell phones.
$10/hour? Why, when you can probably search networks and find another network that's FREE which you can also access from Starbucks(TM)?
;-)
Hell, at home I can see 3 open access points, I don't even have to use my own! Of course, it's the only encrypted one of the bunch