Fort Lauderdale to add Wi-Fi, but reveals the dollars behind it: The airport says that the cost of building out a data network across the airport was $1.6 million, of which the Wi-Fi portion was tiny. This compares to the Massports Boston-Logan request for proposals which estimates the build out cost at $2.5 million across all but Terminal E, which may have a separate arrangement.
Several hot spot firms told me that 75 percent of the cost of build out for Wi-Fi is typically the Ethernet backbone and other facilities. For the Boston proposal to get good bidders, I have heard, they need to eat their backbone costs, which could reduce the contractor's cost to perhaps $500K to $750K.
Roving Planet is cited as the company providing equipment, and the article says Roving Planet runs LaGuardia, too. As far as I know Wayport operates the OSS (billing, authentication, etc.) for LaGuardia and Concourse wired and unwired it. Did Roving Planet provide the hardware? Or that a misstatement in the article?
I was at FLL Airport in mid-July and was delighted and surprised to find a great, open, fast Wi-Fi signal available to all while waiting for our American Airlines flight to depart. I didn't know or expect Wi-Fi to be available there, but it was -- with no login screen, sign-up or anything. I wonder who was running the AP I was using?
Check out the more detailed article in the Miami Herald...
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/6519153.htm
Just to clarify, Roving Planet delivers a management, control and integration platform for WLANs. FLL and LaGuardia (among others) are using Roving Planet's Central Site Director to manage multiple organizations on shared infrastructure.
For LaGuardia, Concourse owns the rights to the WLAN, in which Wayport is an ISP that provides public internet services to travelers. Roving Planet enables this same network to be managed and used by other entities, mainly other airlines and the airport staff.
As for Mike Sullivan's comment, the WLAN at FLL had been live for several months prior to any security and billing practices were implemented, he must have caught it during that time.
If you have any more questions about Roving Planet please feel free to drop me a note.
Seth Goldhammer
Chief Technology Officer
Roving Planet