The Economist reports on the failing business of providing WiFi hotspots at very high prices — especially in Europe (I just spent three weeks there, and discovered that the average cost for a day’s WiFi was on the order of $20 or more). The article points out that lower prices would certainly make a difference, and as Glenn Fleishman points out:
Starbucks has an average of two people per store per day use the T-Mobile HotSpot service; Amsterdam’s airport has just a dozen per day. At these rates, they’ll pay back capital expenses in negative 1,000 years.
Me, I figure that most of the expense of running a hotspot comes from the billing for hotspots. Figure $50 for a cheap access-point and $50/month for a DSL line, and you can imagine coffee-shops turning a profit on free WiFi if by selling one extra latte a day, and a hotel paying off its WiFi by renting out one extra room per floor per month.
Also missing from the article is the painfully stupid practice of using scratch-off cards for WiFi billing, like the network in the Helsinki airport. The network costs about $10 for a couple hours, but the service requires that you buy a scratch-off card with a one-time-use number before you can get on. And these cards aren’t for sale in the airport. What’s more, the captive portal screen (where all this is explained) lists all the places you can buy a scratch-off card in a downloadable, enormous PDF file, rather than on a web-page, and has a tech-support 800 number that can’t be dialled from the payphones in the airport (which disallow toll-free calls). Presumably, this is a significant contributor to the paucity of users for the network — and nevermind the outrageous costs.
(via WiFi Networking News)