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The folks who brought us simple Wi-Fi for digital cameras add locations, modify pricing: Eye-Fi developed a supremely simple 2 GB Secure Digital card that can work with any digital camera and transfer photos over known Wi-Fi networks with no effort. Now they’ve split their original $99 product offering into three items differentiated by features: Eye-Fi Explore, with Wi-Fi-based geotagging ($129); Eye-Fi Share, for uploading to photo-sharing systems ($99); and Eye-Fi Home, which is a cable-replacement service ($79). The Eye-Fi Explore will be available starting 9-June-2008.
The Eye-Fi Explore product relies on Skyhook Wireless’s system of analyzing the signal strength of nearby Wi-Fi networks to extrapolate latitude and longitude. Eye-Fi ties that into their system to stamp images with locations. This deal also ties into Wayport’s domestic network of 10,000 hotspots, most of which are McDonald’s outlets, allowing free uploading via those systems. The purchase price covers one year of hotspot service. All three products work with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, and Windows XP/Vista.
Because Skyhook needs a live Web connection to look up the Wi-Fi environment, Eye-Fi can store the Wi-Fi snapshot when the picture is taken, and manage inserting the appropriate photo metadata (EXIF format) at upload for Flickr and other services that support geotagging.
Geotagging is a very popular idea, something that I’m quite taken with because it pairs the act of taking a photograph with the location at which the picture is taken, making a digital photograph seem a little less untied to reality. But until now, it’s been generally quite involved to match a picture with coordinates. A handful of specialized cameras embed GPS chips, and there’s software to facilitate other methods, but the cost and battery drain of GPS chips have apparently so far kept it from being a widely deployed feature, while the wonkiness of alternatives doesn’t appeal to mainstream users.
Sony once sold this wacky GPS companion (which I just found out isn’t available in either released model) that would track your location over time, and use that information to geotag images via a special software program that let you pair its stream of data with your photographs.
Eye-Fi and Skyhook are doing something almost the same, since the camera isn’t capturing the GPS data, and the Eye-Fi isn’t applying the information live, much of the time. But it’s eminently more usable than the Sony system, because the Eye-Fi handles the assembly seamlessly for you.
Now there’s just one thing to worry about. Think about this: McDonald’s are everywhere, and nearly all of the U.S. locations have Wi-Fi. The Eye-Fi uploads whenever it can, as long as the camera is turned on. You’re geotagging images without any effort. Okay, got it? So…you call in sick to work, and run off to take some photos. Your boss, using RSS to subscribe to your Flickr feed, not only sees your pictures as you wander the town, unknowningly promiscuously uploading them via quick-serve restaurants’ networks, but also knows precisely where you are.
This makes me suggest that you might set your Flickr upload preferences to keep images private and your geotagging preferences the same. You can then expose the images you want for public consumption. The Panoptican is…us!
Posted by Glennf at 9:01 PM | Comments (0)
Cablevision will offer free Wi-Fi to its customers across a swath of New York: The company will spend an astounding $350m over two years—roughly $100 per customer—to put in service that they peg at offering 1.5 Mbps downstream rates. Broadband subscribers to their Optimum Online broadband service, which has rates of 15/2 and 30/5 Mbps. Others will pay for access. The company has 3.1m cable customers in New York.
This is the first large-scale Wi-Fi network announced that had no public/private component to it. While Verizon once said they’d blanket New York City with payphone-based Wi-Fi nodes, that never materialized, and it was unclear how seamless the coverage would ever be. This is a full-blown metro-scale network that’s not beholden to any political interest, and which can likely use mounting rights already available to Cablevision. (In the past, I’ve said this, and folks have said that franchising agreements would exclude additional mounted equipment of this kind. Years later, I have to say I’ve never found anything to support that opinion, but welcome more documented information in the comments.)
The idea is for Wi-Fi to act as a mobile broadband component for Cablevision, to dilute the impact of the Sprint/Clearwire deal announced yesterday. While cable companies rarely compete in a given territory, the Sprint/Clearwire joint venture will make it easier for a customer to get home and mobile broadband and voice from one company, and then turn to another firm for video. This buys Cablevision a quadruple play (voice, video, data, mobile broadband) with a future quintuple play by adding (as they say they will) voice over Wi-Fi service.
Sources indicate that BelAir equipment will be used, which makes sense given BelAir’s release nearly three years ago of a cable-plant compatible Wi-Fi node designed essentially for precisely this contingency. This is a nice win for BelAir, which will likely be selling somewhere north of 15,000 nodes based on the coverage area and service described. BelAir gear also powers Minneapolis, the only successfully completed big-city Wi-Fi network in North America.
Posted by Glennf at 1:21 PM | Comments (1)
It’s on, it’s off, it’s on again: Access to AT&T hotspots is back on again, at least in the fine print, as the company now includes the statement that all iPhone plans in the U.S. include “access to AT&T’s more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks.” (Click the Plans tab at top to see that text.)
AT&T appeared to have flipped a switch several days ago on its “attwifi” SSID that has appeared alongside T-Mobile’s during this several-month transition at Starbucks from one operator to another. iPhone users were presented with a custom login screen that prompted them for their phone number to obtain free access. That gateway page disappeared a few days. I haven’t tested if it’s back, but at least AT&T has, at long last, made the connection that its iPhone customers might enjoy the same free access to hotspots as its 7m fiber and qualifying DSL customers.
Update: And….that information is now gone, Computerworld reports. It’ll be back.
Posted by Glennf at 9:39 AM | Comments (0)
Boingo offers ads-for-access for iPhone, iPod touch users in 28 airports: If you’re traveling in the US, Canada, or the UK through one of the 28 airports operated by Boingo’s Concourse division, you can trade 15 seconds of your life for 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi. The company has tested this previously, and has now rolled the deal out.
The service is enabled by JiWire, which has gradually transitioned itself from a site that developed a hotspot directory supplemented by editorial coverage and how-to’s on wireless data, to one that’s now hotspot directory plus hotspot advertising. The transition is interesting, as it reflects what I’ve seen on Wi-Fi Networking News: Wi-Fi is easier to use, as is cell data; costs for equipment is lower or you don’t need to make a choice about equipment; and usage is up so far at hotspots that there’s an audience there for commercial-based access.
MetroFi has famously declared free access to metro-scale services paid for by advertising to be unworkable; that may be so, given that they were the biggest proponent of it for a few years, and no other company followed them into that approach. However, metro-scale ad-supported Wi-Fi, in which residential and roaming users alike looked at banners and commercials in exchange for servcie is a far cry from the focused hotspot advertising market.
Hotspot ads involve a very open exchange between surfer and service, and JiWire pushes the watch-for-access model quite heavily. What’s saving a few bucks worth to you? 15 seconds? 30 seconds? If so, we have a deal for you, they say, that also works for the advertiser and the service provider (and JiWire). It’s not subtle; you have to watch the ad to gain access. But it seems like a reasonable exchange, with two hours’ access up to a full day running $4 to $12 in the U.S. at paid locations. (Of course, I subscribe to Boingo Wireless’s roaming service now, so I can bypass the ads in favor of paying $22 per month for unlimited usage, too. That’s part of that tradeoff.)
(Disclosure: I own a very small number of share in JiWire as part of my early working relationship with them.)
Posted by Glennf at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
It’s not confirmed by the telecom giant, but several people have been able to replicate it: If you own an iPhone, you can log in at an AT&T hotspot or a Starbucks through their AT&T portal link (upper right corner of the T-Mobile screen, and soon to be a unique SSID), enter your phone number, and have free access. This is nifty, and not unexpected. AT&T is providing free service to 7 million DSL and fiber customers and 5 million remote business access customers. Adding a couple million iPhone users as an additional tie for continued loyalty is a no brainer.
Stories with pictures at MacRumors and Ars Technica. I’ll test this out with my neighborhood Starbucks tomorrow. [Link via Fabio Zambelli]
Update: Well, that didn’t last. It was clearly a test, only a test, and AT&T has pulled the plug for the moment. I suspected that with no announcements, and a national network, they might simply have flipped a switch not understanding how rabid we are all.
Posted by Glennf at 8:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ten thousand is an arbitrary place to put a stick in the sand, but significant nonetheless: The milestone of 10,000 McDonald’s wired up—a few hundred have back access only, due to being stores within WalMart centers—is a vindication of Wayport’s long-term strategy, dating back to 2004. Wayport switched at that point from a slightly more public-faced, public-access company to one that understood that back-office operations could be just as valuable, if less sexy, than front-facing consumer networks. Dan Lowden, Wayport’s long-time marketing and business development chief, said yesterday, “In a lot of these venues, the back office comes first. The Wi-Fi public access for some is a big priority, but for others it’s a nice to have, great thing to have, but the priority is the back office.”
Although several other quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s lack any comprehensive Wi-Fi plan—Burger King, Wendy’s, and Subway to name three of the largest—Wayport is locked out of working with direct competitors. This opens the potential for another firm to handle a several-thousand-location network. Wayport has worked with both McDonald’s corporate-owned stores (about 2/3rds of stores in the U.S.), as well as reaching out to franchisees, who Lowden noted pay a predetermined flat rate for the service via McDonald’s. “It’s made them incredibly efficient to be able to offer this to their franchisees at one price, instead of variable pricing,” he noted. Wayport acts as the layer between various telecom providers, applications and services, and the stores.
Wayport provides several kinds of back-office services, although credit-card processing was the first thing htey rolled out. They’ve extended to remote video feeds for security, Redbox DVD rental systems that are found in some McDonald’s, and kiosks used for job applications. Lowden said Wayport offers things as straightforward but critical as a dial-up fail-safe when a broadband connection drops.
Wayport also manages AT&T’s hotspot network, which puts them in the unwiring seat for the 7,000-odd Starbucks stores that will converted from T-Mobile to AT&T service during 2008. Wayport was once the clear leader in the hotspot builder market, with T-Mobile in the second position. Now, Wayport will be operating through a direct contract or management agreement over 18,000 hotspots in the U.S.; T-Mobile will likely be the second biggest with a couple thousand locations (Borders and FedEx/Kinko’s tops among them). The No. 3 player is hard to figure. Panera?
I’ve been predicting for some time that media on the edge—music, videos, movies, and games stored on servers on the local Wi-Fi network—will be the next big development in venue-oriented Wi-Fi, with Starbucks likely far in the lead. Lowden wouldn’t comment on any specific plans in the works, of course, but said generally, “Storing and caching all that content on the edge…hasn’t been leveraged in the past, but it will be in the future to create a very unique experience.” At Barnes & Noble, Wayport caches some multimedia data that’s available to customers in the stores.
The advantage for in-store media storage is that you can leverage the speed of the local network, and add additional access points to distribute network load. The choke point is no longer the Internet connection, but local network speed. I expect—though Wayport, AT&T, and Starbucks haven’t said it—that Starbucks infrastructure will be all 802.11n for this reason, likely with both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz support for the best throughput in the higher-frequency band for media transactions. (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could only buy movies via 5 GHz.)
Lowden also noted that the proliferation of mobile devices with Wi-Fi built in have led to them reaching out to venues that wouldn’t have made sense for them to work with previously, and for unlikely candidates to reach out to them, too. Wayport is now working with a number of healthcare facilities that, while they have their own network infrastructure, wanted to outsource public access Wi-Fi (whether they choose to charge or underwrite it), and certain applications that they’re not as experienced with running themselves.
A little history: In 2001 and again in 2004, the heat seemed to be on the public side of Wi-Fi: lots of money to be made, ostensibly, lots of partnerships and venues to be built, and an overcrowded supply of infrastructure builders. The year before, Wayport looked to be an also-ran in the hotspot provider business.
Despite being one of the earliest firms to put Ethernet and then Wi-Fi into hotels, and build out hotspots in airports; and despite their survival of the first hotspot meltdown in 2001 during the dotcom crash and brief venture capital shortage; and despite their early entrance into allowing wholesale pricing for hotspot aggregators; the firm seemed about to be eclipsed by apparently deep-pocketed Cometa (with AT&T, IBM, and Intel in various capital and support roles), Toshiba’s mom-and-pop focused turnkey system, and T-Mobile, which had the Starbucks contract. What a difference a year makes.
Cometa, Toshiba, and Wayport contended for the contract to build out back-office and public-access service at McDonald’s in the U.S., and Wayport won. Within a few weeks, Toshiba passed its few hundred locations to Cometa, which shut its doors in May 2004. Wayport, meanwhile, had cooked up a strategy for McDonald’s that it announced later that month.
Their approach involved a fixed-rate charged for unlimited access by retail network partners for all the locations in their pool. This meant that partners had a fixed cost, instead of a per-session cost, and Wayport could obtain specific revenue even before usage by a partner ramped up. Wayport hasn’t discussed the details of this arrangement in depth since, but has partnered with Sony with its Mylo, Nintendo with its DS game player, and ZipIt with its wireless messaging appliance.
The McDonald’s deal also apparently gave Wayport a way to extend its work with SBC-later-AT&T; Wayport had earlier in 2004 became the managed-services contractor for SBC to build out The UPS Store/Mailboxes Etc. nationwide. (UPS dropped AT&T as its partner in mid-2007, although that didn’t appear to have anything to do with Wayport’s role.)
AT&T through Wayport developed its large resold/managed footprint that incorporated resale of Wayport’s McDonald’s locations with the UPS Store and a few hundred other managed locations, including a handful of airports. The Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless put more airports in SBC’s hands, too. (SBC was once the 60 percent majority owner of Cingular; when SBC and BellSouth, the other owner, merged that put the newly rebranded AT&T in charge of Cingular which it relabeled as AT&T. Confusing, huh?)
Posted by Glennf at 9:25 AM | Comments (0)
Although a San Antonio PR guy spotted the AT&T trucks at a Starbucks last week, this press release makes it official: AT&T and Starbucks co-announced today that San Antonio—AT&T’s corporate HQ town—is the first city to be unwired with AT&T’s flavor of Wi-Fi in Starbucks stores. Other markets will follow this year, although, as before, there’s no list of markets nor a time table beyond the notion that “it will continue through 2008.”
The companies also said that AT&T high-speed DSL and fiber customers will gain free access at 7,000 Starbucks starting May 1, but as other eagle-eyed readers have noted, that option is already available on any T-Mobile login page that anyone’s written me about or I’ve seen. The difference will be that a separate SSID called ATTWiFi will be available as an option for network selection, presenting a different gateway page.
Posted by Glennf at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)
Starbucks entertainment senior VP “left” the company today; its CTO subsumes the entertainment function: If you were wondering if Starbucks might provide even clearer signals about its future plans regarding in-store entertainment and its deal with AT&T to take over providing Wi-Fi services and back-end operations, today’s brief announcement speaks volumes. Chris Bruzzo, the company’s chief technology office, will add the entertainment group’s functions to his current purview. This doesn’t surprise me after speaking with Bruzzo two months when the AT&T deal was announced. (A few details from that talk.)
When I talked to Bruzzo, he was clearly focused on how to improve the culture of the stores, with technology being one tool. He talked about connectivity being “a core part of the Starbucks experience” (that’s Experience with a [tm]), and that he wanted Starbucks customers to be able to “tell stories” about coffee, music, and other things. That implies a kind of online medium for discussion and interaction that doesn’t yet exist, but that is more likely to happen with Bruzzo’s expanded role.
Bruzzo had already tipped me to the fact that Starbucks has caching media servers in its stores; that’s how the Starbucks iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store combination technology works with iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPod touch in the several markets in which that’s offered. (Those plans never advanced much after the initial launch, by the way: Seattle, Chicago, and the San Francisco Bay Area got service, but Chicago and Los Angeles are still listed as “coming soon,” and other metropolitan areas are now “by the end of 2008,” which would tie in neatly with Starbucks’ other plans.)
With caching servers, content is pushed to the edge. Retrieving a 2 GB movie from iTunes thus becomes a matter of a few minutes to a laptop (or even faster if 802.11n networks are being deployed by AT&T), rather than 30 to 120 minutes over a typical home broadband connection. Stop in to Starbucks and fill up—with media. Neat, huh?
Back in February, Bruzzo described how the company has a unique relationship with its customers, who are already bringing their digital lifestyle into the stores, allowing hyper-local conversations to take place. “Starbucks is uniquely positioned to provide that kind of very local opportunity. It’s what we do. The beginning of that is what we do today when we curate music, and books.” The new AT&T relationship, he said, “gives us a landscape to continue to experiemnt with those kinds of things even at a local level.”
As for the kinds of devices used, “We shouldn’t be limited in our thoughts about connected devices to just communications devices; they should be PSPs [PlayStation Portables] and cameras.” I expect that we will see a lot of change, much of workshopped in Seattle-area stores, in the digital side of Starbucks this year.
I will also repeat my expectation that the launch of a 3G iPhone will involve a Starbucks tie-in, and that the date for the first Starbucks AT&T markets to go live with AT&T in charge will coincide with the release of the 3G iPhone. The timing is too close to be coincidental. (Rumors today are that the 3G iPhone will be announced at the June 9 developers conference that Apple runs. I’ll be at that event’s keynote.)
Bruzzo has been with the company for not much over a year, coming off a few years as head of communications (talking, not technology) at Amazon. In January 2008, he was boosted to chief technology and chief information officer, as well as being appointed a vice president. That’s a pretty fast rise; he must have, you know, a few good ideas. He’s behind My Starbucks Idea, the site the company is using to let its customers give it free, valuable advice. One of the fascinating, Cluetrained elements of that site is the transparency: ideas that are submitted can be viewed by other visitors to the site, and voted upon. Suggestion boxes are usually locked tight, whether in the real world or on the Net. Some posts have thousands of votes and hundreds of comments.
Today’s announcement also included a note that Starbucks is selling its Hear Music division to its partner in the venture, Concord Music Group. Hear signed Paul McCartney among other musicians; Starbucks will keep working with Concord, so this might not be quite as big a change in direction as a change in its internal focus. This is yet another move of many by company head Howard Schultz, who took charge of the firm again, and started getting rid of top executives, reorganizing divisions, and making announcements about massive changes in the stores, notably replacing its barista-hiding super-automated coffeemakers with shorter, more controllable systems, and tearing out the stinking breakfast sandwich ovens.
Posted by Glennf at 3:01 PM | Comments (0)
BT opens up its hotspot network, while maintaining control: Can BT, by controlling the hardware and network infrastructure, let businesses effectively become new hotspots in its OpenZone network? I discuss this and more in this mobile post.
Posted by Glennf at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
BT will upgrade its business customers broadband modem firmware to allow public hotspot service: This is a very, very interesting move on the part of the UK’s giant telecom provider. The company will upgrade the firmware for its BT Business Total Broadband customers, which number 170,000. By flipping a switch, the business’s modem will create an outpost of BT OpenZone, using a separate SSID, and a “secure Internet channel,” as the press release describes it, which means a VLAN or similarly segregated connection that prevents access to the business’s internal network.
The notion is that visitors can gain Internet access by using an existing OpenZone subscription, paying a fee (the business can sell vouchers), or being a member of a roaming network. The business customers receive 50 to 500 minutes of use on OpenZone each month themselves, based on their BT contract for broadband.
This business hotspot option extends a previous relationship for residential users with Fon that allows BT home users to flip a switch and become a Fonero.
These kinds of organic extensions of networks have very little impact on the party that’s sharing their broadband, because there’s almost no work involved. But if enough people opt in, it can have a large impact on the amount of hotspot service that’s available. While I have critiqued Fon for its backside-utility quotient—how readily one can get work done or even make a phone call at many Foneros’ locations—the BT business plan assures that hotspots will be in places where people work and gather.
Posted by Glennf at 1:51 PM | Comments (0)
Russian regulator requires registration: The folks at the Rossvyazokhrankultura (Russian Mass Media, Communications and Cultural Protection Service) have decided that every device with Wi-Fi inside requires registration for use by an individual user without a transferrable license, according to The Other Russia, which picked the story up from Russian-language site Fontanka.ru.
While Wi-Fi wasn’t as broadly unlicensed in Russia as it is in most other industrialized nations, a state regulator exempted indoor use in certain bands from registration. The Mass Media agency apparently believes that it has the authority to compel this, although there’s some doubt by observers as to whether it really falls in their purview.
Setting up a home Wi-Fi network or a hotspot would require what sounds like vast amounts of paperwork, akin to putting a cell tower.
Posted by Glennf at 8:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
T-Mobile’s roaming deal with AT&T has obviously already kicked in: Astute reader Klaus Ernst let me know several days ago that the New York Starbucks locations were offering an AT&T login on the gateway page. I lackadaisically tried this out yesterday here in Seattle. AT&T has a ton of roaming partners, so it presents an interface that lets you type in whatever your particular credentials are to gain access. With my Boingo Wireless account, I have easy access to Starbucks now. The screen below was captured on my iPhone at a Starbucks in Fremont, Seattle (otherwise known as the center of the universe).
Posted by Glennf at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)
Some thoughts about backhaul, cell networks, and the future of hotspots: Do hotspots whither and die when everyone has mobile broadband? Only if everyone—not just teenagers—is writing email while walking down the street, driving with one hand and watching movies with another, and conducting all phone calls in motion. Fixed locations can provide higher bandwidth to a small number with lower costs.
Posted by Glennf at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
iPass has released its latest semi-annual statistics: The company is looking for a little attention, of course, but they provide a relatively huge amount of data (relative to everyone else in the industry) that helps highlight trends in Wi-Fi hotspot and, new this time around, 3G usage worldwide. Their user base is largely corporations that integrate iPass into their networks to allow worldwide roaming at set or metered rates on Wi-Fi, mobile broadband (via laptop), and dial-up with a single corporate login and end-point policy enforcement. This gives them numbers that reflect usage among the mainstream corporate business traveler.
The company found that European usage is accelerating, with Europe now accounting for 40 percent of their sessions worldwide in the second half of 2007, up from 31 percent in the second half of 2006. (All contemporary numbers are from 2007’s second half.) North American usage dropped from 60 to 51 percent during that period as a percentage of the whole. As an increase, European usage jumped almost 150 percent while North American usage doubled: iPass saw nearly 2m sessions worldwide at Wi-Fi hotspots, up from just over 1m in the same period a year ago. Worldwide growth in total sessions year over year was 89 percent.
Rick Bilodeau, vice president of corporate and channel marketing, said that growth in Wi-Fi usage represented in part frustration with high 3G roaming costs in Europe. He said that European regulation has already forced a price drop for 3G roaming, however. It’s “coming down from the stratosphere; they’re going to drop into the 50,000-foot range. These drops still don’t make 3G roaming affordable. Your break-even is now 5 emails instead of 2,” he said, referring to the potential for emails to carry megabytes of attachments and 3G plans charging per-megabyte roaming fees.
European Wi-Fi prices still outpace North America’s, and Bilodeau said a drop in 3G roaming might “start to apply pressure to European Wi-Fi prices.”
iPass found big jumps in usage at venues outside of hotels (29 percent) and airport (45 percent): cafes, restaurants, transit, and other categories. Cafe usage grew modestly, from roughly 175,000 sessions to nearly 250,000 sessions, but restaurant usage jumped from 25,000 to about 80,000 sessions. “The restaurant growth is really driven by McDonald’s around the world,” Bilodeau said. The fast-food giant started marketing their Wi-Fi service more broadly in 2007. The service has been in place in some restaurants for three or more years in the U.S. iPass includes not just domestic McDonald’s stores, but has a total of 10,000 outlets worldwide in their roaming network.
London tops city usage, and experienced 156 percent year-over-year usage growth exclusive of London hotels and airports. Only 8 countries saw more usage than the metropolis of London.
With 2.5G and 3G usage, the company tracks just laptop users which have roaming and service agreements handled by iPass. The firm found that as users become more accustomed to mobile broadband, they start using more data, with established users (those with accounts before 2007) using significantly more data than users who started service in 2007. Both categories of users increased their monthly average usage by about 25 percent across the year, which comes in part from larger, more compelling downloadable content. (Read: YouTube.)
A stat that jumped out at me from their report was the breakdown of exclusive 2.5G, exclusive 3G, and mixed 2.5G/3G usage within a given month by their customers. Only 3 percent of users only used 2.5G, which isn’t unusual, as iPass is selling 3G service. But just 38 percent used 3G exclusively; 59 percent used a combination of 2.5G and 3G.
What interested me was that there was a group that was able to use just 3G—that’s tricky even in excellent coverage areas, as even a minor hiccup could downshift a user to a slower network offering. Bilodeau said that users adapt to where bandwidth is best, and that many users are “bumblebees,” an industry term referring to those who roam, but with predictable pattern.
“Where I work may be dictated by where I get a 2.5G or 3G connection,” he said. “You adapt your habits to fit your technology.”
iPass also found that just a tiny percentage of its 3G users were extremely heavy downloaders: just 0.5 percent topped 2 GB in a month, while 32 percent used 50 MB or less per month. Their 3G users are also regulars: more than 90 percent of 3G subscribers used the service in any given month. This makes sense, as the cost of 3G remains high enough that there’s little point in subscribing if you’re not making use of it; and using it justifies continuing to subscribe.
iPass makes available a variety of tables of this data on their Web site.
Posted by Glennf at 5:00 AM | Comments (0)
The chief marketing office of Ericsson, a handset maker, says that Wi-Fi hotspots will be increasingly irrelevant: This story has some legs because it’s so outrageous. But let’s examine what John Bergendahl means.
From a handset perspective, the increasing availability of 3G, its ever-faster speeds, the roadmap for 3G’s evolution and 4G services, the capabilities of handsets, and the services that people actually want on handsets (viewing movies, streaming video from YouTube, taking and sending high-quality photos) are all factors that make Wi-Fi less relevant.
In Europe, Asia, and America, there’s enough capacity and enough advanced devices to do interesting things now, but usage hasn’t grown fast enough—partly due to excessive pricing—to drive aggregate speeds down for users except in the most congested areas. I’ve heard scattered reports of people seeing 3G slowdowns at conferences and so forth. The 2.5G EDGE network basically failed at Macworld Expo last January because of the thousands of iPhones all trying to grab a slice of limited spectrum in San Francisco.
Bergendahl sees the challenges as coverage, availability, and price. That’s all true, and in Europe more so than in the U.S. Europe has better coverage and availability, but the price for roaming outside one’s home country or network is extraordinarily high. Some voluntary efforts to drop roaming prices are underway to forestall 3G data price regulation by the European Commission, such as went into effect 25-June-2007 for voice roaming.
The problem is that he is thinking as a handset maker: he’s thinking about capabilities, selling more handsets, and overall revenue from value-added services that he can make sure his devices deliver. This is fine. But it’s not how carriers think. There’s a growing disconnect between capabilities built into handsets and those offered by carriers. Nokia’s insistence on building somewhat open-platform phones with Wi-Fi and video capabilities have hardly been leapt on by European carriers, and those devices aren’t sold at all in the U.S.
Really, Wi-Fi is a heat-sink, a complement to 3G. It’s a way to inject bandwidth into a network at fixed locations where someone might sit to watch a video or carry out some task that involves being static. You can make phone calls in motion, but you’re rarely jogging or driving while watching a video or composing email. (Okay, studies show lots of emails written by drivers. Still.)
Wi-Fi can be fed through direct wired network connections, allowing carriers to offload bandwidth-intensive tasks without disallowing them. Apple, for instance, only allows its iTunes Store to be used over Wi-Fi on an iPhone or iPod touch—as the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store—rather than stress the EDGE network’s low capacity.
You can see how T-Mobile and BT are pairing Wi-Fi and voice, and building networks that allow them to compete for the best cellular customers, letting those customers talk longer but use a much cheaper medium over which calls are placed. AT&T hasn’t gotten the religion yet about pairing Wi-Fi and cellular plans, but that’s clearly coming, and with a 17,000-plus hotspot U.S. market, we’re going to see some new ideas from them, too.
Really, 3G doesn’t compete against Wi-Fi because the same operators that run 3G networks can benefit directly from Wi-Fi networks. Until 4G networks are built, Wi-Fi’s local network speed and its typical backhaul speed will far outpace what cellular can deliver, and occupying cellular frequencies with big downloads is a poor use of scarce frequency over which other revenue can be better extracted.
Posted by Glennf at 2:48 PM | Comments (2)
Apple adds enterprise features to the iPhone, including 802.1X, and opens it to developers: Today’s announcement from Steve Jobs was full of surprises, including the fact that Apple licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync for full Exchange support, and the level at which developers will have access to iPhone hardware and information.
The 2.0 software, free to all current owners of iPhone, will be available in June, which kind of tips the hand as to when we’ll see a 3G iPhone, too, I imagine. iPod touch owners will pay a “nominal” upgrade fee, as Apple books iPhone revenue over 24 months and iPod revenue as units are sold.
Apple will pile in all the stuff that enterprises demanded from Research in Motion in the Blackberry platform—and that RIM built in—including support for 802.1X (including WPA2 Enterprise) for authenticated Wi-Fi login, two-factor authentication, certificates, and additional VPN types. They’re also adding “remote bricking,” a critical feature that allows a stolen or misused phone to be remotely and securely wiped.
On the developer side, Apple is opening up the whole puppy in a way that I didn’t expect. I assumed the firm would put limits on whether the cell data connection could be used by apps, but not restrict the Wi-Fi side. The announcement puts nothing off limits except VoIP over cell data, although there’s a list of characteristics that software can’t contain, such as being malicious or a bandwidth hog. All software is distributed and installed via App Store, available on an iPhone or in iTunes for synchronization. This includes free software. Apple will therefore vet, and ostensibly be able to halt use of programs that exhibit behavior they deem bad. Jobs said, “We can turn off the spigot if we need to.” Every app will be signed by a developer certificate.
Developers can have access to location information provided by Google (cell towers) and Skyhook (Wi-Fi) for use in their programs. No mention was made of privacy settings for such. Skyhook’s Loki toolbar requires that you grant permission to Web sites that want to obtain your location details; I expect a system-wide approach to that, too.
No mention was made today of a few particular problems with iPhone security, such as the ability to tunnel and traverse a VPN across multiple network media, such as using an iPhone for a secure connection while you travel from work, across the EDGE network, and to hotspots. This likely could be built on top of the enterprise features. You’d also need policy management, such as disallowing certain kinds of connections without a VPN being active or over non-trusted Wi-Fi networks.
Certainly, this is a big step forward for corporate users, mobile applications, and consumer ease on the iPhone platform. The beta is available today to developers; you can become a developer for $99. Amazingly, Apple’s developer site crashed and is still unavailable two hours after the press conference ended.
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Starbucks provided one more bit of clarification about free access related to its stored-value card: I understood last week that Starbucks required a single purchase on a Starbucks Card every 30 days to enable two hours of free service each day. This would cover any stored-value card, including gift cards, but unrelated to their Visa-branded Duetto card.
In fact, as a Starbucks spokesperson confirmed to me and my colleague Eric Lai at Computerworld that you either need to make a purchase or put more value on the card. As Lai points out, if you’re extremely pecuniary, you could make a purchase every 60 days and put value on the card (a minimum of $5 each time) on alternating 60-day periods. I actually quite like the cold sandwiches and salads at Starbucks if I’m not a fan of their roasting style, so I’ll have no trouble with this requirement.
Lai also teased out one more detail: the free access is for two consecutive hours of service each day, not for two hours in sum. Which means that if you need to use the service more than two hours apart in two locations, you need to either set up multiple accounts and have multiple Starbucks Cards; pay the $4 for two consecutive hour as-you-need-it price; or be a subscriber to a network like Boingo or AT&T.
My dirty little secret as a Wi-Fi-focused reporter is that I have never had a subscription to any hotspot service for more than a month or two at a time, as I travel rarely these days and have found that paying nothing or $5 to $10 for a handful of sessions has outweighed the monthly fees. Now, however, I’m a Boingo subscriber, and will remain one—not to play favorites, but they have the best deal for my purposes in wandering around Seattle, and occasionally winding up in airports and downtowns of various cities.
On my prediction that Starbucks would never be free: I was off base in this prediction, but I predicated my prognostication on the notion that T-Mobile would never give service away for free. It had never entered my head that Starbucks would suddenly open negotiations to replace T-Mobile. My various sources indicate that the plan came about pretty quickly, and that T-Mobile was surprised to find itself not the winner. This is clearly part of the new direction that Howard Schultz is taking the company, but CTO Chris Bruzzo told me a week that when he arrived about a year ago at Starbucks, he was revved up on making sure that Wi-Fi was a more integral part of the store experience; now it will be.
T-Mobile apparently had no interest in being involved in providing more free service, and isn’t in a position to use Wi-Fi as a tool for loyalty as AT&T can. AT&T is selling cell and landline and wired broadband; this extension of Wi-Fi to Starbucks costs them a rounding error, and reduces their churn by some unknown factor. If 100,000 people a year choose to stick to AT&T, and perhaps even expand their services, that’s potentially $200m in revenue (100,000 people times $2,000 a year between cell contracts, phone, and broadband) that they would otherwise have had to spend tens of millions of marketing dollars to keep or would have lost entirely.
Will McDonald’s go free? That’s the next question. Starbucks was set up on a collision course with McDonald’s as Starbucks introduced hot food and other services; but the ovens are being pulled out of the coffee giant, even as Mickey D puts espresso bars into most of its stores. McDonald’s move seems a bad idea. However, the spirit of competition might drive the fast-food purveyor to offer a similar customer loyalty program for free access. At one point, you got two hours of free service in McDonald’s for a purchase, but it’s unclear to me from all McDonald’s branding whether that’s still the case.
(Photo by Rudolf Schuba. Used under Creative Commons license.)
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One of my stock lines for the last five years has been: “Hotspots will either be free or cost you $20 per month”: I’ve written that line many times, and told it to many reporters. What I meant by it was that the cost of providing service would approach zero for most smaller venue operators relative to its value; that Wi-Fi would be an expected amenity, and thus required, and part of normal operating expenses; and that the quality of free service would improve to a point that free could compete against hourly charges. With hotspot advertising thrown into the mix, that can subsidize enough of the remaining costs in places where venue operators want that subsidy above additional traffic.
Simultaneously, however, the idea of spending $20 per month for unlimited access at essentially all interesting venues also seemed to me to be the right price point and something that people who regularly travel for business, even within a city, would find no problem justifying and expensing, or having their firm pay for.
The Starbucks and AT&T deal that brings free access at Starbucks stores to a wide swath of both companies’ existing customers exactly proves my point, coupled with Boingo’s announcement this week of finally reaching a deal with Wayport to incorporate McDonald’s restaurants into Boingo’s aggregated hotspot network; and the incidental inclusion of all Starbucks by year’s end in the Boingo network through their existing roaming relationship with AT&T.
Regular Starbucks customers who already use their stored-value card will get two hours of free use per day for 30 days following any purchase on a card. (Before you write in about: I’ve now confirmed these precise details three times with Starbucks. Folks are trying to tell me a purchase every day is required and other variations; you talk to the company, you get a difference answer, you call me.) New customers, even those that don’t like Starbucks’s coffee, can simply make a cheap purchase of mints or something every 30 days to keep the two hours a day rolling.
For those who need more predictable access, and want airports and hotels included, the price is now $20 or $22 per month. AT&T charges $20 per month for unlimited use of their “Premier” worldwide roaming network of 70,000 locations (including the Starbucks transition, starting in second quarter 2008), about 17,000 of which are in the U.S. Boingo charges $22 per month for unlimited access to all U.S. locations or $39 a month for 100,000 locations worldwide with no metering. (AT&T’s fee is just $10 per month for expanded roaming for customers covered by the free “Basic” network deal—1.5 Mbps or faster DSL and all fiber-optic customers—which includes about 16,000 U.S. locations directly contracted by or resold by AT&T. Most hotels and airports aren’t included in Basic.)
There was a point not long ago where unlimited U.S. Wi-Fi hotspot access was more like $30 to $50 per month for a subset of all available networks. Boingo dropped its price a few years ago in a “promotion” to $22 per month, and then made it permanent. T-Mobile kept easing the terms of its cheaper monthly packages, ($20 to $30 per month depending on subscriber type, with a long-term commitment; $40 per month without a commitment), and increased the locations covered with airport roaming deals.
But these networks were essentially incomplete. So it’s a kind of neat tying up this week, where the price of unlimited service is now about $20 per month with complete U.S. networks included; or free if you can deal with a few ads or a purchase a month or just happen to be the right kind of DSL or fiber subscriber.
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Beautifully detailed story at ComputerWorld on the reaction of non-Starbucks cafes to Starbucks switch to more free Wi-Fi with AT&T as partner: The reporter spoke to a lot of cafe owners and chains, and elicited some marvelous responses. The short story is: Hey, we’ve been free for a while; what took Starbucks so long?
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In a deal that’s been years in coming, Boingo’s aggregated hotspot service now includes 9,000 McDonald’s stores: Coming on the heels of Starbucks’s switch from T-Mobile to AT&T, this is a very good week indeed for Boingo Wireless—they’ll be adding the two biggest chain networks in the U.S., both of which dwarf the next largest network.
Boingo sells aggregated access to roughly 100,000 hotspots worldwide: unlimited U.S. access is $22 per month, while worldwide is $39. A mobile device service is $8 per month worldwide.
Christian Gunning, Boingo’s marketing director, noted that McDonald’s may have a reputation for bringing in local people and consumers, but, “The McDonald’s [addition] also helps you with a subset of the business traveler group, the windshield warriors, the regional sales guys, who go from town to town to town.”
McDonald’s locations are operated by Wayport under an arrangement that they first secured in 2004 where resellers of the service pay a flat rate per location in the network rather than a per-session fee, which is otherwise common in the industry to this day. (Read “Wayport’s Wi-Fi World Switches from Per-Connection to Per-Venue Fees,” 2004-05-24, for historical background.)
AT&T’s new contract with Starbucks also puts the coffee giant’s 7,000 stores into Boingo’s roaming arena as the telecom firm takes over management during 2008. Starbucks and AT&T said a schedule hadn’t yet been set for the first market to switch to AT&T, nor which markets would switch first; just that it would start in second quarter 2008.
(Industry trivia contest: By the end of 2008, AT&T will have the largest network in the U.S., with over 17,000 hotspots directly under contract; who is #2? Panera has over 1,000 locations with free access, and I’m not sure any hotspot network is larger than that.)
Boingo also announced today that it had joined the Wireless Broadband Alliance, a several-year-old international group that facilitates roaming agreements among its members, T-Mobile’s U.S. operations being the only American component. Boingo operates 28 airports in the U.S. and UK, and that gives them some leverage.
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Devicescape has its first operator partner for its seamless login system for mobile devices and laptops: Devicescape’s approach is to remove the necessity for a device’s owner to have to sign in: no tedious entry (and memorization) of account details for your camera, iPhone, or what have you to get online. The operator deal puts their software front and center in the plans of the carrier as it rolls equipment and services out to its customers, driving more use in this case of the 8,000 hotspots offered across Europe by DT. Reducing friction in getting a device on a network almost by necessity increases a network’s use. The company also announced its operator service.
Devicescape recently released its 2.0 software—see “Devicescape Releases New Connection Software: No Computer Required to Configure, Gain Hotspot Access,” 2008-02-05—which allows properly equipped devices to connect to a hotspot network without any prior configuration or Web site account setup.
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Yesterday was pretty overwhelming, trying to sort out all the facts, and the impact: The bits and pieces of this industry-changing deal will keep shaking out until and past the launch. I have some detritus from yesterday to catch up on, as well as some new analysis of what this means. (You can also read my coverage in The Seattle Times, where I discuss this as more of a general business story.)
The Starbucks Card and free access: The press release from Starbucks and three conversations I had with them yesterday finally made clear what the free 2-hours access requires. You need a Starbucks Card, which is their stored-value card, not a credit card. (Their Starbucks Duetto credit card will, however, also qualify.) Starbucks Cards can be purchased at a store with a minimum fill of $5.00 that you can use to buy stuff at the store. Once you have the card, free Wi-Fi service is activated by a single purchase of any amount on the card every 30 days. No purchase is needed each time you use the free Wi-Fi nor for the 30 days following a purchase! (A reader asked whether you also had to be an AT&T subscriber. No.)
AT&T’s network scope and pricing: AT&T isn’t very clear about what they include in various free and fee roaming packages. After consulting their Wi-Fi site and talking to an AT&T spokesperson yesterday, I think I have the story. DSL, fiber, and business remote-access customers (the 12m we’ve been discussing) get the Basic package included at no cost, which isn’t 17,000 (with Starbucks included) but isn’t far off. It’s McDonald’s (8,500) plus Starbucks (7,000) plus Barnes & Noble (several hundred) and a few other chains/venues and airports that AT&T operates itself. Most U.S. hotels and airports operated by other providers require a Premier subscription, which also adds 53,000 international locations. For those who get Basic for free, the Premier subscription is $10.00 per month; all others, Premier is the only option for a subscription, and it’s $20 per month. Pricing is explained, but not very clearly, on their Wi-Fi page; you have to look at that page and then at the location finder to sort this out.
AT&T Wireless customers: There’s no deal here for anyone but DSL, fiber, and remote-access business customers. Those will cell plans don’t (yet) get anything special. That includes…
…The iPhone: No iPhone update yesterday, but everyone I interviewed was winking slyly.
Media in the stores, and Apple: Starbucks chief technical officer as much as told me that Starbucks has Apple media servers in their stores that feed out songs and previews based on what’s programmed in the stores. The move from there to caching digital movie rentals and popular downloads is very, very small. I’ve written a long piece explaining this for Mac journal TidBITS: Starbucks Deal Brewed with AT&T Has Hints of Apple. You’re going to walk into Starbucks, log onto free or cheap Wi-Fi, and download a movie for rental in a few minutes from the local network.
3G iPhone: Oh, yeah, I predict Starbucks will be part of the launch plan for the 3G iPhone, which I would now wager will appear in second quarter because that’s when AT&T will have some markets up and running with Wi-Fi in the coffeeshops.
Location: Starbucks CTO Chris Bruzzo also emphasized community, location, and digital experience. He had few specifics, but the idea of bringing in portable devices, like cameras and games, and spending time interacting online in some fashion, yet to be described, with a community that’s highly local to the store seemed the theme. He also mentioned location-based services in passing, since each store obviously has a fixed location; T-Mobile was providing some location-based information before this, but more extensive offerings sounds planned. Bruzzo was hip about broadcasting Web services that devices on the network would pick up, instead of talking about a Web browser to Web server equation, which is more laptop oriented.
Many devices, one account: You’ll be able to use the same account or Starbucks Card code to bring multiple devices online at the same time, within reason. Bruzzo at Starbucks said it would be handled in a reasonable fashion; an iPhone and laptop logged in at the same time wouldn’t cause the system to complain. They’ll track MAC addresses—that’s adapter unique IDs—to avoid real abuse.
Wi-Fi as glue between home and true mobility: AT&T also told me yesterday that the abundance of “free” in this deal had to do with cementing a customer’s connection seamlessly along whatever they do. Joe Izbrand, a spokesperson, said, “The benefit is in our ability to continue to big the largest Wi-Fi connect, to deliver converged connectivity across the board, it’s part of what we’re trying to do to keep people connected no matter what they’re doing, on the home, on the road, whatever. In the competitive marketplace, that’s a real differentiator.”
T-Mobile and Starbucks: As noted yesterday, T-Mobile data subscribers will have fee-free roaming access onto Starbucks when the transition to AT&T happens in each store, for now and “for years to come” according to a revised statement released late in the afternoon yesterday by T-Mobile. The statement also clarifies that T-Mobile HotSpot@Home customers who use the converged cell/Wi-Fi handsets for calling over either kind of network will also be included in this. The deal lasts “at least the next five years.” I don’t have details on this, but I have been told that the transfer of provider was abrupt, and I suspect that Starbucks made this a condition of the AT&T deal to avoid any of its customers being upset by a service transition. While numbers of monthly subscribers have never been released, it’s likely in the 100,000 to 125,000 range. I can’t see many fewer, and it’s hard to see decisions T-Mobile made if the number was much larger.
Wayport’s catbird seat: The first person I called when I heard about the deal was Dan Lowden at Wayport, a long-time executive who has been through all the changes in the market. Wayport is AT&T’s managed service partner, and has the direct contract with McDonald’s, to which Wayport resells access to AT&T; they’re picking up 7,000 more locations to manage through this deal. “I think this is some of the biggest news in the industry ever,” Lowden said, and I am loathe to disagree; the only other news that might qualify as “bigger” were failures, such as the shutdown of Cometa, which ultimately has made little difference in the market’s evolution. In fact, the original Starbucks deal with MobileStar in 2001 was one of the factors that launched hotspot deployment at a faster pace. I asked Lowden about the role of mobile devices in their networks. “We work with a lot of these device manufacturers as they’re coming to market” to ensure a good connection experience, Lowden said.
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