Boingo, a WiFi hotspot subscription service, has just rolled out flat-rate, worldwide WiFi roaming for $40/month. Boingo lets you login to other companies’ WiFi hotspots all over the place (particularly in Europe, where the local tarrif can be through the roof — one hotel I stayed in in Amsterdam charged €45 per 200 megabits of traffic). For some of these, Boingo subscribers have had to pay a hefty surcharge (it was more than $0.10/minute at the Paddington Hilton in London). With the new Boingo plan, it’s one fee, everywhere.
I pay for a T-Mobile WiFi plan and it sucks. They charge gigantic roaming fees to use other T-Mobile WiFi hotspots around the world — $0.14/minute in London’s Starbucks! T-Mobile Italy charges US T-Mobile roamers more than they charge Telitalia roamers — the company charges its own customers more than customers of the state-owned telco!
I’ve had a comp Boingo account for a couple months now and I’ve found it to be way more useful than my T-Mobile account. It works at more airports, hotels, coffee-shops, etc than T-Mobile does, by far. The only bummer was the roaming fees, and now that those are gone, this is a no-brainer for anyone who puts in a lot of road time. You can spend more than $40 on one night’s WiFi in a hotel — $40/month is totally worth it.
(via Engadget)