The official press release comes a few hours later than the New York Times story which had a side mention of the deal: Wayport's Wi-Fi World model gains immediate traction with the partnership of SBC, which offers phone and data service across 13 states. In the Wi-Fi World model (explained here), Wayport charges a fixed monthly fee per location in their retail venue network to each reseller.
SBC hired Wayport as a managed services provider to build out their own unique FreedomLink network. This deal puts SBC front and foremost as the first to resell under Wi-Fi World, but also the first to participate on the back-end of Wi-Fi World, too, as a network provider. Wayport said during its briefing on Wi-Fi World that network providers who chose to participate in marketing opportunities would pay Wayport a monthly fee, reducing the cost of network service.
So with Wayport working in several different ways with SBC, most of which are non-exclusive or at least non-restrictive against future reseller and network partnerships, they've kept their per-location costs extremely low in SBC's territory. Wayport's CEO said two weeks ago that with a single reseller and with McDonald's arrangement to also pay fixed per-location management fees, they were already at break-even for the network's cost.
SBC's resale of Wayport's network in incremental to The UPS Store partnership, so that FreedomLink customers will get both McDonald's and UPS Store venues for the $19.95 per month unlimited usage fee. The press release reiterates that SBC DSL subscribers will receive a "significant" discount on this price later this year.
In a Reuters story about this deal, SBC notes that they are selling 3,000 Wi-Fi gateways per day as part of their promotion to home users.