Hotspot Hits for April, 2005
Week of April 25-29, 2005
Week of April 18-22, 2005
of Louisville, Ky. Verge also recently got a contract to unwire Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, Calif. —April 18, 2005Week of April 11-15, 2005
Wayport is already providing Wi-Fi-based high speed Internet access (HSIA) in 59 properties run by John Q. Hammons Hotels. This morning, it announced five more: four Embassy Suites in Hampton, Va. (295 rooms), St. Charles, Mo. (296 rooms), Albuquerque, N.M. (261 rooms) and Frisco, TX (334 rooms); plus the Holiday Inn in Springfield, Mo. (120 rooms). Meeting rooms and common areas are also covered in all five.—April 14, 2005 RoomLinX is also adding a new hotel to its roster: the Belden-Stratford in Chicago's Lincoln Park, owned by IRMCO Properties.—April 14, 2005 Canadian WISP FatPort has been endorsed by Choice Hotels Canada as the select vendor to provide both wired and wireless HSIA. Choice Hotel chains Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Quality and Clarion are all under orders to provide such service. FatPort is already in four Quality Inns and one Comfort Inn, as well as 50 other non-Choice hotels in the country, with over 250 hotspots in total. —April 13, 2005 Global WiFi Plus (GWP) is upgrading its existing wireless facility on the top of Santa Cruz, Calif.'s Mount Madonna Mountain to increase the bandwidth available for wireless broadband. The move will let them expand service to nine communities without broadband. The customized Wi-Fi-based service will now go into 2,000 households that previously could not get high-speed Internet service in areas like Logan, Chitteden and River Oaks. A second phase of the project expansion will extend GWP's signal toward the South Bay area of San Francisco. —April 13, 2005 FirePlanet of New York City is offering hotspot services for businesses, with access that can then be resold or given away to end users. Cost for subscribers is generally set at $20 per month for unlimited use or $6 for a day -- or per minute: $12 for 300 minutes, with additional minutes for 10 cents each; or $3.50 for 20 minutes, with additional for 15 cents. The cost to the venue ranges from $249 a month on up, depending on the bells and whistles and revenue sharing plan wanted. The target audience for FirePlanet hotspots is the usual suspects: cafés, restaurants, resorts, marinas, the hospitality industry, public areas, etc. —April 11, 2005 Lodging Wi-Fi/HSIA service STSN is no more... the company (still named STSN) is changing the service's name completely to iBAHN to reflect its overall branding for hotels. The iBAHN brand name was previously reserved for the company's "premium secure managed broadband services." —April 11, 2005 Another marina for ICOA's iDockUSA? Sure, why not: Port Royal Marina of Redondo Beach, Calif. is the latest to get full Wi-Fi coverage to all slips. —April 11, 2005 The Register in the UK says BMW dealers theare are getting BT OpenZone hotspots installed in London-based service center waiting areas. That way, owners waiting for a car to get serviced can go online for #6 per hour. —April 11, 2005 Week of April 5-8, 2005
28 businesses in St. Charles County in Missouri are investigating whether they should turn the 586 square mile suburban area into "America's first totally wireless Internet county." The businesses, calling themselves Partners for Progress, are working with St. Louis-based consultants Fusiva to do a two-phase study. Fusiva has served as a consultant before to telecoms and carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint on wireless and microwave deployments. It's still too early to say what form this will take.—April 8, 2005 ICOA's iDockUSA will be used by SailAmerica to provide all the Wi-Fi connectivity at this month's Strictly Sail Pacific Boat Show in Oakland, Calif., in the Jack London Square. The show starts on April 13th, and is the largest all-sailboat exhibition on the U.S. West Coast, with 100 vessels and 300 exhibitors.—April 8, 2005 According to the UK's PCPro, BT OpenZone's 1,500 hotspots are now available for roaming to BroadReach customers -- and likewise for OpenZone customers at the 350 locations BroadReach operates as ReadyToSurf in the UK. As of this deal, OpenZone says its subscribers can reach 7,800 hotspots around the world through various roaming partnerships. BroadReach hotspots work with Skype through a previous deal, but the OpenZone hotspots are not currently set up to support the popular VoIP software.—April 8, 2005 RoomLinX has installed high-speed Internet access (HSIA) over wireless in both the rooms and common areas of the Seneca Hotel and Suites in downtown Chicago. Service is free throughout the hotel. (The company is also in the process of buying out a competitor, SuiteSpeed, in a stock swap. SuiteSpeed also exclusively puts HSIA in hotels, and works with properties like Renaissance, Courtyard by Marriott, Holiday Inn, Radisson, Hampton Inn and Best Western.)—April 6, 2005 GoMoorHead!, a WISP in Moorhead, Minn. (pop. 33,000), operated by the Moorhead Public Service, is planning to provide wireless broadband throughout the area using Tropos Networks MetroMesh equipment. The network, which will go live in July, will cover the 13 square mile town. MPS thinks 5,000 households and 600 small businesses will sign up for the service, which will cost $20 or $25 a month (respectively). Subscribers can choose to lease or buy a wireless bridge to connect them to the service. —April 6, 2005 The recently reported on Education First Network is already improving, and it's barely off the ground. The group, which plans to allow roaming between school campuses across the United States through partnerships with Airpath and others, is also bringing Telex Communications into the mix. Telex will be able to provide schools with its Vega IP-based communications equipment which bridges radios like cell phones and two-way handhelds with the Wi-Fi network. This allows the EFN network to serve public safety officers and first responders in emergencies, who may not be using Wi-Fi-based equipment.—April 6, 2005 NextWeb is planning to offer fixed wireless broadband to around 50,000 potential business customers in the greater Los Angeles area. Downtown was covered first, in March, using three "pre-WiMax" base stations. Later this year, the next three phases of deployment will extend first west, then east (all the way to Ontario). NexWeb is already set up to the south in Orange County (the O.C.!) and north to Ventura and Santa Barbara. NextWeb will also bring its Broadband Access Network Coordination (BANC) group to the area, similar to what it has done in the Bay Area, allowing all broadband wireless providers to coordinate their use of unlicensed radio frequencies to prevent interference.-- April 5, 2005 The college town of Isla Vista, California, home of the University of California, Santa Barbara, now has a downtown 10-acre hotzone courtesy of FireTide's mesh equipment, installed by Incipient Technologies. The free-to-use Wi-Fi signal covers 26 businesses (including a Starbucks), and three parks. -- April 5, 2005 Wayport continues to offer some extras for its hotspot end users. Now it's offering free weather advisories, via AccuWeather.com's real-time doppler radar. Of course, these users could surf over to the AccuWeather site to get this, but the radar will be right up front on the Wayport sign-in completion page.-- April 5, 2005 No more watching your kid fall to the ice after she misses that triple Lutz—you'll be too busy surfing the Web! VSC Sports, which operates skating facilities across the U.S., has signed with DONOBi to get Wi-Fi hotspots installed at its various locations. DONOBi is a member of the Airpath Provider Alliance, so users of Airpath-powered hotspots can use the services at VSC Sports centers for free.-- April 5, 2005 The East Side Union High School District in San Jose, Calif., has gone wireless. Teachers at Santa Theresa High School, for example, can turn a classroom into a hotspot as needed with a mobile cart complete with AP and printer, with 30 Apple iBooks available for student use. Over at Biotech Academy, students can sign out a laptop for use in labs. The network is monitored and controlled by Roving Planet software.-- April 5, 2005