T-Mobile will announce Monday more roaming, high usage: The T-Mobile HotSpot division had planned to make their announcement Monday, but the embargo was broken early, and coverage is all over the mainstream media. The hotspot operator had 1 million user sessions last month, 3 million in the last 90 days, 8 million sessions last year, and 15 million since 2002.
The division says it has 450,000 active paying customers, which is a mix of subscribers and users with accounts who use pay-as-you-go services for hourly or daily access in the last 90 days. They provided no information about how frequently non-subscribers purchase access. The Wall Street Journal says the company told them that subscribers were a majority of those users.
T-Mobile said that average session time has increased from 23 minutes in 2003 to 45 minutes in 2004 and 64 minutes last month.
Their new roaming arrangements are all for-fee but at reduced rates from retail pay-as-you-go pricing. The company will increase the number of domestic airports in its network to a total of 72, and its roaming and local hotspot count will jump to over 25,000, leapfrogging (for the moment) Sprint PCS and iPass aggregated hotspot count of about 20,000 each internationally.
Of the 25,000 locations, only about 6,000 are included in unlimited subscription plans in domestically operated locations. The other 19,000 locations include about 6,000 international T-Mobile locations and 13,000 other network operations, many through the Wireless Broadband Alliance. Pricing for roaming was not disclosed.
Read more details in The Seattle Times, The Dallas Morning News, and Investor's Business Daily.