M1 halts its Wi-Fi deployment: Although much is being made of this decision, it's obviously a business case problem. We don't know what it costs to deploy Wi-Fi in Singapore for starters, and we don't know the financial resources of M1. Nonetheless, it's the first major dropout internationally in the Wi-Fi hot spot scene.
It's clear that there isn't a paying audience to provide a break-even run for Wi-Fi hot spots at the moment, either in the US or internationally. But audiences must be built. I just interviewed the owner of a small coffeeshop in Seattle who offers free wireless. He opened two weeks ago. On the first day, with no advertising, he had three people with laptops using Wi-Fi. People are trolling for it.
Does this mean they'll pay? Still too early to tell. The for-fee value proposition has to combine higher speeds with reasonable costs and wide footprint.
I'm increasingly convinced that bringing 512 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps to a cafe may wind up being too little, hot spots in high-traffic zones may need to differentiate themselves by coping with the real backhaul issues and bringing in superior-to-broadband service. If people can, for a reasonable fee, have access to tens of thousands of locations in the US (or at least ubiquitous across where they travel), and have it consistently business-grade quality bandwidth, and have it substantially faster than they have at home or most places of work, then you have a proposition people will pay for as it provides a triangulation of factors.
If you can get more or less the same thing for free as you have to pay for with a little hunting or a short walk, or if you can get reasonable modem like speeds everywhere for a low monthly rate (a la 2.5G), then perhaps those bleed off enough subscribers that the hot spot market doesn't work as a commercial, separate revenue operation.
Mark my works: backhaul is much more important than has previously been given credit, and T-1s aren't necesssary the answer. 8 Mbps down/1 Mbps ADSL could be a more useful alternative if offered alongside business-grade promises for service.