Wi-Fi hotzones expand; retailers, schools contract for managed services
AT&T is extending its Wi-Fi services, turning selected hotspots into larger-scale hot zones and aggressively marketing its Wi-Fi managed services to education, healthcare, and retail markets. It’s all about wireless access, anywhere.Two years after acquiring Wayport, a provider of Wi-Fi hotspot Internet access, AT&T announced December 28, 2010 that it will expand its New York City Times Square hotzone, and add new ones near Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, as well as at the Embarcadero Center, in San Francisco.AT&T Wi-Fi Services launched three hotzone pilots earlier this year, in New York City, downtown Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago’s Wrigleyville. According to the carrier, the idea was to test the use of Wi-Fi as a supplement for cellular wireless in urban areas with intense wireless usage. For AT&T “supplement” means several things: using both wireless technologies to offer customers Internet access wherever they may be; exploiting Wi-Fi’s higher bandwidth, compared to 3G, for a range of media-rich applications; and servicing some Wi-Fi only applications, such as Apple’s FaceTime video chat for iPhone 4 (and soon, if rumors prove to be true, for the next version of the iPad tablet).Customers at the three hotzone test sites made 350,000 connections in just a few months. In Q3 2010, AT&T almost 107 million Wi-Fi connections, an all-time high. There are about 23,000 hotspots available, according to the company.Wi-Fi connections have been surging overall, says Dennis Whiteside, assistant vice president for marketing and technical sales at AT&T Wi-Fi services. “We did 20 million [Wi-Fi] connections in 2008,” he says. “We did that in six months in 2009. In 2010, that took us five weeks. It’s only going to take us a few days to do 20 million connections in 2011.”AT&T has a range of Wi-Fi plans. For AT&T High Speed Internet customers, as well as iPhone or LaptopConnect customers, Wi-Fi use is free. It’s available as a stand-alone service for $20 a month, or on a per-connection basis for $4. One of AT&T’s priorities has been creating for customers a “seamless” handoff between cellular and Wi-Fi connections, without interrupting the user’s session, according to Whiteside. That’s done through an AT&T client application already embedded on the handset or mobile device. “When that client sees an AT&T Wi-Fi SSID [network name], it moves the device over and we proxy authenticate it to our backend, to confirm it’s an AT&T customer on a qualified plan,” Whiteside says. “Then our system moves the customer from the 3G to the Wi-Fi network or vice versa.”Whiteside says that offloading wireless data from 3G to Wi-Fi is “not a central theme” for the carrier, though Wi-Fi usage may ease the data crunch in specific cell sites. “The data volume is important to us, and how the customer [data use] trends are going,” he says. “But it’s just to a given location. Across the U.S., it’s not material to the whole 3G [traffic] volume.”Despite the surging use, most of the AT&T Wi-Fi network remains based on 802.11g or 11abg access points. “We’re rolling out 802.11n at venues where it’s appropriate,” says Whiteside. Apart from public access hotspots and hotzones, AT&T is expanding its Wi-Fi managed services business. It designs, builds and maintains public or private (or both) wireless LANS for colleges and universities, stadiums, and retail chains like Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart division. Wi-Fi service is available now in 500 Sam’s Club stores, offering customers the change to compare products and prices via a smartphone, for example.In October 2010, Indiana University, which has a secure private Wi-Fi network for students and staff, unveiled an AT&T public Wi-Fi network for guests and visitors.
