Wi-Fi hot spot access should cost about half as much as it currently does, according to an executive of a company that supplies providers such as BT and O2 with hot spot directory services.
Mark Carter, the business development director of Connect Spot, told ZDNet UK on Friday that pre-pay access — which continues to dominate the market due to users wanting to use the nearest hot spot regardless of the operator — should be priced at between £2-£3 per hour rather than the current £5-£6.
"Corporate customers want effective communications when they can get it at a price they can justify," Carter said. He added that "effective bundling" in terms of convergence was still a way off, but cited BT's Fusion service as a step in that direction.
Carter suggested that the Wi-Fi market was reaching maturity, as providers began to consolidate, footprints began to cross over and companies increasingly turned to installing wireless networks with free "touchdown" points — outside the company firewall — for visitors and contractors.
Analyst James Enck of Daiwa Securities agreed that pricing was too high, and told ZDNet UK that Europe was lagging behind the US, where Wi-Fi is now "pretty much an amenity that you expect to be thrown in for free".
"The [telecommunications companies] got in early and decided to impose this payment model and people have come to expect that, but I think it should change," Enck said on Friday.
Another analyst, Matt Yardley of Analysys Consulting, told ZDNet UK that municipal Wi-Fi projects such as that currently underway in Norwich could have an impact on the market as people begin to expect cheaper or free connectivity.
Yardley also confirmed that pricing would be affected by convergence, which increasingly involves a Wi-Fi access element, whether domestic or corporate.
A spokesperson for BT Openzone — a major provider of hot spots in the UK, which charges £6 per hour for access — said his company's service was "priced extremely competitively in the market" and represented "excellent value". He pointed out that BT recently offered its broadband and mobile customers wireless connectivity for £5 a month, and occasional users from 20p per minute.
Connect Spot supplies BT Homezone with payment gateways and distributes the Hotspot Selector application — which incorporates an offline directory service as well as multi-provider credentials "wallet" — to operators such as O2 and T-mobile as a "white label" product, and also via download. It has recently been making a play for the corporate WLAN market.
Talkback
These Raid-feeders of broadband pricing should have their hard-drives examined?
In the Netherlands it's possible to get flat-fee unlimited Internet access with your mobile for under EUR 10 per month but at GPRS speed. At UMTS or HSDPA speed flat-fee unlimited Internet access with your mobile (laptop) would cost between EUR 40 and EUR 60 a month but you can't get high-speed everywhere just yet.
Who needs HotSpots if you can get unlimited flat-fee mobile (laptop) Internet access everywhere? Possibly your company won't and thus save a bundle (also security risk wise).
That said, international mobile Internet data traffic will still kill your budget very very quickly. And without notice some have discovered (especially those that travel close to national borders or overbroad).
As such it would help if all Mobiles would come with free software that would automaticaly demand manual user intervention to establish (data)communications over a foreign network each and every time.
It would even be better if flat-fee unlimited Internet access with your mobile would be possible EU, or even Region 1, or even completely world, wide.
But who cares for the Lisbon Act anyway.