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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
So how do you turn a grass-roots infrastructure into one system that customers can connect to almost anywhere? That's where Sky Dayton comes in. The boyish founder of EarthLink, which grew from a small dial-up Internet service provider into a service second only to AOL in size, recently launched Boingo, a nationwide wireless ISP that doesn't operate any access points. Rather, Boingo pops up its branded "Connect" button whenever any one of thousands of its individual Wi-Fi partners' networks are in range. Customers pay a monthly fee to Boingo and the company then splits its revenue with the network owners.
Right now, Boingo has fewer than a thousand sites signed up nationwide -- a piffle of the millions needed for ubiquitous coverage -- but Boingo is the first high-profile consumer offering of roaming Wi-Fi service.
"Until Boingo, you really had to know what you were doing to find these networks and connect to them," Dayton says, likening the current status quo to the early days of the dial-up Net. "We're at that stage where you've got to know to set your modem to 2,400, 8 bit, and have the right serial cable."
As Dayton learned at EarthLink, luring enough customers to build a sustainable business requires both removing those technical hurdles, and building a larger and larger "footprint" over which subscribers can connect just as if they were at home -- a local call in EarthLink's case, a one-click connection for Boingo users.
But while Dayton, a self-described "über-aggregator," sees Wi-Fi as "the next frontier of the Internet," Boingo still relies on someone else to invest in building the network, and that's a hot potato in the aftermath of blowouts like Metricom and Mobilestar, which went bankrupt last year wiring Starbucks so I could have the whole place to myself.
The biggest scarecrow is Metricom, whose Richochet antennae -- not Wi-Fi, but a wireless Internet service nonetheless -- now sit dormant atop lampposts from San Jose, Calif., to Washington, D.C., warding off would-be imitators. One Wi-Fi entrepreneur sighs, "I think Metricom had happy customers. Just not enough of them." A new owner hopes to restore Ricochet service late this year, but in limited high-subscriber areas.
"This is the great lesson being taught to the wireless industy," says Bennett Kobb, author of Wireless Spectrum Finder, a reference book on U.S. bandwidth. "These vast systems like Iridium that require a global rollout before you earn one penny will fail, as opposed to these incremental systems based on local coverage."
Setting up network infrastructures sounds like a job for the phone company, but the big wireless carriers like Sprint PCS and Cingular have a very different idea of what "wireless Internet" means than do Web-surfing Wi-Fi junkies.
"Messaging -- SMS -- is probably our biggest area of use," says Steve Krom, Cingular's vice president of business marketing and product development. "When you look at the wireless Internet specifically, what people are really looking for is the basics -- news, sports, stocks and looking up very specific info related to their life." All of which Cingular delivers, in limited fashion, via phone screens and two-way pagers that eschew normal Web access and existing e-mail accounts -- you won't be blogging from your phone anytime soon.
