Leading the way in the Wi-Fi revolution
Is there any advantage to leading the way in Wi-Fi hotspots around the country asks this New York Times story (registration required) about Wayport ($100M in venture capital, looking for $10-$15M more) and the other players. Especially when every telecommunications company is jumping into it, too, and cellphone companies are expected to capture as much as 50% of the total Wi-Fi revenue by 2006.
I first used Wayport when they'd just launched Laptop Lane which was a welcome sight for many business travelers like myself. I loved it. My more recent experience with Wayport at the Four Seasons Hotel in Newport Beach was so so. It worked most of the time. And only after an initial struggle which ended in my calling the front desk and them connecting me to Wayport tech support.
But even with hundreds of locations, the numbers are small. Wayport's traffic, while growing 5 to 10 percent a month, amounted to just 30,000 connections at airports and 170,000 connections at about 500 hotels in a recent month. Wayport receives anywhere from 50 cents to $5 for each connection, analysts estimate, depending on its revenue-sharing arrangement with the location and whether the connection came from a reseller network.
...Wayport turned to reselling in part to cope with the one-two punch delivered to its core audience from the dot-com slump in early 2001 and the travel slowdown after Sept. 11, 2001. The company changed its model from paying for most of the capital costs of installation to requesting that locations share or provide upfront costs, with tradeoffs for later revenue sharing.