Barnes & Noble bookstores will be fully unwired as hotspots by Sept. 2004 via Cometa: Remember how we noted the lack of news since fall from Cometa a few days ago? This doesn't quite qualify as the kind of news that Cometa wants publicized. The Barnes & Noble deal has been well known since early 2003. For some reason, however, the execution has been severely delayed while Barnes & Noble's leading competitor Borders was fully hotspotted by T-Mobile's network. So while this adds a significant number of locations to Cometa (pushing them to nearly 1,000 publicly committed or unwired locations), it's more of a confirmation of how long it takes to move from a deal starting to actually executing.

Barnes & Noble has 647 stores nationwide, and hasn't quite regained the momentum it lost by trying to compete head to head against Amazon.com. Their online venture has done extremely poorly, never achieving more than a fraction of Amazon's book sales. This move to add Wi-Fi is certainly an attempt to bring savvier users in.

One factor I've wondered if Borders and Barnes & Noble have considered: as David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times pointed out in a story a couple of years ago, the big box booksellers have moved from discounting many titles to just heavily discounting a few. This means that the kinds of users likely to use the Wi-Fi service might also be likely to price compare. They browse the book in the store and then order it online for free shipping and 30 percent less. (My site, isbn.nu, offers book price comparisons by title or ISBN, for instance, among several of its ilk.)

There's an egregious statement in the press release that I must explicate: Unlike other public Wi-Fi networks, where customers have only one choice of service provider, the Cometa Hotspot(sm) network at all Barnes & Noble stores will be open to multiple providers. Customers can choose which provider they want.

This isn't about the customer, it's about the network. If you want to resell Cometa hotspots as a wireless ISP to your customers, you have to arrange a deal with Cometa in which you agree to pay their wholesale fees. And in many hotspot locations, customers actually already have a choice: the native network (Surf and Sip, for instance), a roaming partner (FatPort, for instance), or several aggregators (iPass, Boingo, GRIC).

Further, there are no national networks except Boingo that allow a user to simply sign up and gain unlimited fixed monthly fee access to virtually all popular networks except T-Mobile. (iPass and GRIC offer their services via resellers, but they meter their services.) So the question of choice is moot: who is competing against Boingo's $21.95 per month rate?

Who are the other networks that these customers are members of that they would want to be able to choose among to use a Cometa location? The value proposition of choice is unproven in the context that Cometa cites it.

Cometa wants to suck all the cell carriers into its wholesaling model, but it still lacks enough locations of the kind that cell carrier customers need to be a major player in the industry. Their plans over the next few months might reveal that they have been spending the last year in contract negotiations, and have some of the additional thousands of promised locations and dozens of additional Cometa-ified cities.

AT&T just severed its Cometa relationship, and AT&T Wireless doesn't list its Cometa hotspots in its hotspot finder. The next few months should be telling.

A fellow Weblogger also points out that T-Mobile service is in many of the Starbucks locations connected with B&N (so much for customer choice), and that his local Barnes and Noble stores have removed seating in their stores, leaving the Starbucks cafe as the only sitting alternative.