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May 10, 2004

Sean O'Mahoney New Excilan CEO

By Glenn Fleishman

FatPort’s Sean O’Mahoney is cell-payment-enabler Excilan’s new CEO: We rarely cover management changes at Wi-Fi Networking News, but O’Mahoney’s move is worth noting. O’Mahoney helped build FatPort from a small Vancouver, BC (Canada), company with an interesting hardware platform in 2001 into Canada’s dominant hotspot provider and platform reseller. While the four Canadian cellular telephone carriers have made roaming announcements and issued press releases, they have yet to build out a presence, and may have just a handful of hotspots by year’s end among them.

FatPort has 140 locations according to their Web site, mostly centered in British Columbia. But their platform has allowed them to resell their managed services and hardware/software combo, and will potentially yield hundreds of additional locations this year, most of which will include free roaming across FatPort’s own network.

O’Mahoney—along with Rick Ehrlinspiel of Surf and Sip—has been most aggressive in offering bilateral fee-free roaming agreements, having aggregated over 800 locations worldwide for their customers through these agreements. Unlike models in Europe, in which roaming means paying extra to use non-local networks but using a single login, FatPort’s model offers a single login and a fixed monthly rate no matter which partner network is being used.

Excilan is a natural fit for O’Mahoney’s approach. Excilan’s technology allows hotspot operators to partner with cellular carriers without building client software that an end user must install nor assigning new usernames and accounts to cell owners.

In the Excilan system, you visit a hotspot’s gateway page and enter your cellular telephone number. If your carrier is part of the Excilan system, your phone rings and an automated system asks you to authorize a charge. When you agree, the charge shows up on your bill at the negotiated rate your carrier has with the hotspot operator, and your laptop or handheld is authenticated through the back-end.

FatPort and Surf and Sip are the only North American network users of Excilan, while mostly European cell carriers have signed up to enable their subscribers. Overall, nearly 50 hotspot networks are involved worldwide partnered with 14 cell carriers with 23 million customers.

In an email interview, O’Mahoney said, “For the Excilan system to reach its full potential we
have to extend our reach into U.S./North American market as quickly as possible.” He added that the rest of the Americas were also important. O’Mahoney also hopes to work with other aggregators of hotspot networks to help make it easier for hotspot networks to work with many aggregators. “As an ex-WISP manager I know it is very confusing to deal with all the aggregators,” he said.

Other hotspot operators have told us at Wi-Fi Networking News the same: the benefits are there to resell to aggregators, but the increasing number (iPass, RoamPoint, etc.) add burdens to the infrastructure. “They all ‘get’ roaming, but day-to-day they have many more fundamental issues to deal with,” O’Mahoney pointed out.

Posted by Glennf at May 10, 2004 9:01 AM

Categories: Cellular, Hot Spot, International

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