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January 3, 2005

Wayport Hits 6,300 Locations

By Glenn Fleishman

Wayport has 6,300 locations equipped; 5 million sessions in 2004: Wayport announced that they have exceeded 6,300 hotspots between locations with which they have directly contracted and those that they operate as a managed service, primarily for SBC Communications’s FreedomLink network. The company also said that they had 5 million connections in 2004, with 600,000 in October alone. Wayport had about 1,000 location at the end of 2003, and a significant subset included in-room wired broadband hotels with Wi-Fi just in lobbies. Virtually all new locations are Wi-Fi only in retail establishments.

Dan Lowden, vice president of marketing at Wayport, said in an interview on Monday that Wayport believes they are now the biggest Wi-Fi network in the U.S., having exceeded T-Mobile’s count, which is just under 5,300 according to T-Mobile’s location finder. (This doesn’t include T-Mobile’s fee-based roaming partners.) “We’re very very excited about it; it’s a big milestone for us. We’re excited to be the biggest in the United States,” Lowden said.

Lowden said that Wayport is adding about 150 locations per week. They expect to exceed 6,000 McDonald’s restaurants by third quarter of 2005, pushing their total over 10,000 locations.

Because certain large footprints have already been tied up, such as many coffee chains, and because of Wayport’s exclusive deal for fast-food restaurants with McDonald’s, Wayport is pushing into different kinds of spaces and services. For instance, their deal with Hertz gives them an alternate presence at airports. And Wayport will work with venues that may not need public Wi-Fi at all, or it’s an adjunct to the real purpose: private services like cashless transactions (which they’re doing with McDonald’s) and security.

Lowden also noted that even with the hotel market so widely built out with high-speed services, there’s still a lot of room to grow or rebuild. “We continue to see opportunities where folks have had three or four service providers over the last three or four years,” he said. Wayport’s now an established firm with major partners making it easy for them to bat clean up in cases such as these.

The company has grown fairly rapidly in the last year to handle the new contracts with over 330 employees now, with 150 hired in the last year.

Posted by Glennf at January 3, 2005 9:23 PM

Categories: Hot Spot

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» Wayport Hits 6,300 Locations from Lockergnome's Mobile Lifestyle
According to this article from the Wi-Fi Networking News, Wayport is adding 150 locations per week! This just insane! When did they start growing so darned fast anyway? At this rate there is going to be a hotspot on just... [Read More]

Tracked on January 3, 2005 10:50 PM

» Wayport i el model de negoci flat-rate from pofHQ
Wayport va donar la volta al model de negoci tradicional dels WISPs el Març del 2004 amb la seva innovadora estratègia de preus que es basa en cobrar una quantitat fixa mensual (flat-rate) per hotspot a la empresa (revenedor o agregador) que explota el... [Read More]

Tracked on January 6, 2005 11:11 AM

» Wayport Hits 6,300 Locations from Lockergnome's Mobile Lifestyle
According to this article from the Wi-Fi Networking News, Wayport is adding 150 locations per week! This is just insane! When did they start growing so darned fast anyway? At this rate there is going to be a hotspot on... [Read More]

Tracked on January 12, 2005 7:33 PM

Comments

Posted by: Rich Tanksley at January 5, 2005 10:41 AM