Welcome back Glenn,

It's not such a dumb idea if you look at it as a way to reduce churn and losses to Cablevision, Time Warner, and Comcast, the other broadband ISPs in this territory. Verizon has such a lousy DSL deployment here, they need an additional compelling reason for people to stop defecting to cable. It's not about Wi-Fi revenue, maintaining these hotspots costs squat. How much can bandwidth cost the ILEC? Plus, there's already power to the phone booths. So may about retaining customers, and upselling your installed base. If you step back, why can't an ILEC or other ISP use Wi-Fi the same way Schlotzky's does, to increase customer loyalty and revenue on higher margin products?

For the laptop user that lives in the burbs and commutes to Manhattan, it gives them a reason to switch to Verizon DSL at home and drop their cable modem and/or dialup provider. That is, if Verizon is even able to deliver the service, which is a whole 'nother blog.

Not so nutty, if you look at it from another angle.

Assuming that the Verizon stuff works, and launching off the metaphor of a "digital filling station", i.e. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3470&t=technology

Does this mean that people in Manhattan will double park in front of phone booths?

They already double-park in front of phone booths, but that's just because the curb is there. ;-)

As far as the usage restriction goes, it makes the closed access points easier to deploy. Instead of having to hook them into the billing systems, and possibly writing a new one to handle single-use transactions, all they have to do is join an existing authentication infrastructure.

Of course, it's easier to be open.

Hello All:

This weekend I did some testing of the Verizon hot spots and put the results on two posts on my my blog

Bill K.