Sprint now claims 19,000 hotspots in its aggregated network: The company announced that it will gain another 6,000 locations from Quiconnect, 3,800 from Fiberlink, and several hundred from Pronto, Opti-Fi, and Nomadix. (The Fiberlink locations are actually resold from Boingo's aggregation platform, although that fact isn't mentioned anywhere.)
Sprint previously had arranged deals with SBC, Wayport, Airpath, STSN, and Concourse, as well as limited bilateral roaming with AT&T Wireless (now Cingular) for airport access. Those locations must have totaled 10,000, although I'm having a little difficulty adding up all of the component networks.
One of the key elements Sprint is pushing is its Extended Workplace, a way of having a single user interface for connecting across all kinds of communications methods, including dial-up, Wi-Fi, cell data, and Ethernet. Extended Workplace provides companies with a way of enforcing end-user policies, like VPN usage or anti-virus protection--just as with software from remote-access providers like iPass.
Pricing for Extended Workplace is $120 per month per user for unlimited Wi-Fi and Sprint PCS Vision (its brand name for 1xRTT data service) with additional metered fees for dial-up and other connection services.
The article bizarrely quotes a Sprint business development manager stating that Sprint started building airport Wi-Fi service in 2000 and now has seven airports. Now I've been writing about and researching airport Wi-Fi since 2000, and I can state categorically that Sprint didn't start getting into the business as a provider until 2003. If they were providing the back-end outsourced services, then they were handling it for Nokia and other companies without revealing their brand at the time. Nokia, Wayport, and MobileStar unwired the first airports in North America that I'm aware of all before 2001.