Two interesting pieces on this morning's WiFi Networking News:
Intel's free networking day benefitted free networks: in hindsight, it seems obvious that the biggest beneficiary for publicity for free wireless will be free wireless networks. Still, the stats are compelling:
…the Starbucks in downtown Portland had 40 unique logins while Portland's free Personal Telco hot spot downtown had 176 unique logins.
Hotspot suppliers are offering competing packages for cafes that want to offer free wireless, including one that claims to "stop spam" (??). It's not clear to me, though, why a cafe that wants to give away free WiFi needs a "managed" solution (which requires that you depend on a tech-support queue for problems) that costs $300 when the "unmanaged" solution (a regular access-point, which can be "fixed" by turning it off and on) costs $40.
The moral of the story: Free WiFi is really, really free. Or at least cheap. The brisk market in WiFi gear, combined with the commodity nature of packets, makes it hard to engineer the kinds of market-failures in WiFi that represent gigantic marginal profit opportunities.
