iPass is best known for its corporate connectivity software and remote office hardware, but today enters the individual traveler business: Boingo Wireless can’t exist in a vacuum. The service they’re offering to individuals and through private-label rebranding is obviously cash-rich enough to attract the interest of iPass, a long-time provider of business connectivity that currently has 3,500 companies as customers, including 417 Fortune 2000 firms.

Their new service, iPassConnect Mobility Service, is an attempt to appeal to regular business travelers and individuals. With plans that start at $30 per month, the offerings are comparable in many ways to Boingo, but have a couple of interesting twists that may appeal to a different set of travelers. Notably, all plans include dial-up service, and two of four plans include unlimited 3G (US only, over EVDO).

No one offers a combination of service that’s comparable in scope or price to iPass’s new offering. While Boingo Wireless is cheaper ($22 per month for North America, $39 for global) with a similar Wi-Fi footprint, travelers that need 3G for its ubiquity and dial-up for its use as a backstop have no better choice than iPass.

iPass currently claims a network of 95,000 “active” Wi-Fi locations, which is a subtle dig at Boingo, which often lists their total of signed locations, which expands in count before all new locations are integrated into the footprint. iPass uniquely includes current Starbucks locations run by T-Mobile; Boingo and other aggregators will start to include Starbucks as AT&T takes over the network.

The four plans iPass will offer are paired as two North American plans, and two “global” plans. Their North American Wi-Fi offering at $30 per month includes their entire US and Canada Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and dial-up footprint. Piero DePaoli, iPass’s director of global product marketing, said that dial-up remains useful for travelers in more remote areas where Wi-Fi isn’t an option. The service currently requires Windows XP, 2000, or Vista.

A global Wi-Fi plan that rolls up all 95,000 Wi-Fi locations and worldwide dial-up service will cost $45 per month. For “that business traveler that definitely leaves the country on a semi regular basis, this is going to be a service that is going to be very attractive,” said DePaoli.

Adding cell service to each plan takes the service up to a total of $70 per month for North American Wi-Fi plus US 3G, and $85 per month for global Wi-Fi plus US 3G. At a $40-per-month incremental cost, this is a much better 3G deal than any of the cell operators.

iPass requires the purchase of a $125 PC Card EVDO modem (includes shipping and handling), and a 1-year commitment with a $175 early cancellation penalty. The company will consider adding other form factors, like ExpressCard, as demand warrants.

For enterprise users, iPass aggregates dial-up, Ethernet (mostly US hotel), Wi-Fi hotspot, and 3G service into a single login that’s integrated with corporate networks to preserve one user, one password, end-point security (VPN, anti-virus, firewall), consistent billing, and cross-corporate averaging of services.

For now, businesses with multiple employees that are below the threshold of needing iPass’s full-bore plan (which is available through value-added resellers, too) will need to sign up for individual accounts under this new individual service.

This new offering is part of what seems to be a trend in both resale and aggreation of hotspots. Starbucks chose AT&T as its new Wi-Fi operator in part for the ways in which AT&T would promote usage, including offering free service to a large swath of existing AT&T customers. Likewise, iPass’s entry shows that there’s a market for flat-rate services for predictable expectations that spans beyond plain Wi-Fi. 3G never looked this cheap before.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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An explination of some of the new media terms like podcast, wiki, blogs

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Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Houston Chronicle call for city-wide Wi-Fi (in different ways): It’s a very odd set of circumstances that led columnists and editorial writers in three major metropolitan newspapers to come up with the idea to write about this independent of one another.

The New York Times is least informed. It suggests that Internet access is “a basic part of the infrastructure of education and democracy.” That conclusion is poorly drawn, however, due to several factual errors in their exegesis. They wrote: “…many American cities, caught up in a tide of technological and fiscal optimism, promised to try to make Internet coverage available to all by making it citywide, wireless and low-cost or even free.” True! But they leave that statement hanging there as if that’s how proposals were written.

As I have extensively documented over nearly four years, Philadelphia and San Francisco quickly dropped the “free” part, not requiring it in their proposals. Of all major cities in which plans were made, only Portland, Ore., had a free (ad-supported) option for a baseline service. (Google’s offer for SF as part of EarthLink’s plan called for 300 Kbps service.)

In discussing EarthLink, they take a recent specific statement about the future without backtracking it to last summer: “EarthLink is calling it a change in strategic direction. What that phrase means, simply, is where’s the profit?” No, it means: How, as a company, does EarthLink survive? By pour hundreds of millions of dollars it can’t afford into projects that can’t produce a return?

“The neighborhoods that most need low-cost, public wireless service now find themselves largely dependent on Internet access through public libraries.” Right, and that doesn’t require a 95-percent coverage commercial buildout. We’ll get to that in a moment in Houston.

“Philadelphia gave EarthLink free access to utility poles for mounting wireless routers.” Uh, no, editorial page of the New York Times, it did not. EarthLink and Wireless Philadelphia have a complicated arrangements with the local utility over placement and electricity. It wasn’t free to either EarthLink or WP, the actual operator (ignored in this editorial entirely, by the way).

“The costs of building a network turned out to be higher than expected — at a time when prices for private Internet service were dropping. It also hurt, in Philadelphia’s case, that there was a major change at EarthLink, which went from being an advocate of municipal Wi-Fi to a company determined to cut costs.” Again, some specious use of facts. “Higher than expected” is a gross understatement. Prices dropping, when they were cut in some markets by incumbents by a third, at least for 1 or even 2 year promotional rates, is “plummeting.” And, finally, the “major change at EarthLink” was the clear realization that their Wi-Fi approach was disastrous (paying for everything with no municipal commitment) while Helio was also poised to bleed them dry.

“EarthLink should fulfill the commitments it made.” Excuse me, bah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s columnist Chris Satullo has a short set of pithy advice: Don’t let the goals of Wireless Philadelphia die. The mayor’s office should hop on finding private partners, and make a significant commitment of its own. Save the partly built network, and make the economics work to preserve its potential benefit for the city. (WP continues to get high marks for it efforts in getting computers, training, and access to low-income folks in Phila., although Joshua Bretibart continues to question how some of the bills were paid and deferred by WP related to electricity, among other topics.)

Now, I’m biased on this last one, in the Houston Chronicle, as I spoke to the editorial writer, who solicited my views (among many others) on whether Houston’s “bubbles” of access plan, which will involve about $3.5m of their $5m late fee from EarthLink, made sense versus an all-at-once strategy. As the Chronicle writes, and I agree with, working with the most needy neighborhoods, were computer ownership and literacy are lacking, to provide access along with systems and training, is a brilliant approach.

Why? For a few related reasons. First, bringing computers, training, and Internet in all at once could rapidly allow people to gain the skills necessary to pull themselves up slowly out of poverty or the edge of poverty. You need computer skills for better jobs, period. Kids who grow up in homes without computers aren’t prepared for the demands of white collar jobs, medical jobs, and increasingly categories of blue-collar jobs.

Likewise, by building only in “bubbles” with specific disadvantages, Houston could become a place of experimentation by firms that want to donate gear or bandwidth, that want a tax write-off, or by local companies that want to fund such efforts further. Building a whole city is tough and, I’d argue at this particular technology junction, misguided. Building well-covered hotzones with a particular purposes plays into the ability to test ideas before shooting the whole wad of bills.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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The tap, tap, tap next to you will be accompanied by a woo-hoo! In-flight broadband is approaching, as I discuss in this audio mobile post.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Why would a company choose it’s name as “Vrigin”; I have no clue. The unholy alliance between Tatas and Virgin came through and got a sanction from Department of Telecom. They are legally bound to stay together; unless Virgin decides to act funny and kick Tatas below the belt, literally. I am opposed to the […]

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My pal Julio Ojeda-Zapata walks around Minneapolis, and is relatively pleased with its network: Julio writes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the twin city to Minneapolis, and one that hasn’t yet engaged in what was an explosion of requests for Wi-Fi networks by cities. He had a rocky start, unable to even get a splash screen, but ultimately was able to pay for a 24-hour pass ($10), and had consistent service on a laptop, albeit at half the 1 Mbps rate he was paying for. He couldn’t get an iPod touch (Apple’s iPhone without the phone Wi-Fi iPod) to work well on the network indoors, but had better luck outside.

The same day Julio’s article appeared, his colleague Leslie Brooks Suzukamo filed an article about the challenges of leaves, something that’s a big issue in Minneapolis, covered with the leafy menaces: 200,000 of the suckers that Gipper said caused pollution (as an allergy sufferer, I agree with him). Trees leaf out and reduce signal propagation, and that’s something that US Internet Wireless has had to deal with. They upped their density of nodes from 26 to 42, which appears to be about the norm for both starting and ending points in muni netwrk planning.

This article goes into a little more depth about the problems with dead areas due to absent or problematic utility poles (it’s always about the poles). USIW plans to install some of its own poles to fill in those areas.

Nearby, Steve Alexander notes a pioneering wireless network at the University of Minnesota has become obsolete. The U of M is replacing its 7-year-old 802.11b network with an 802.11n system. As is true in most older networks, they’ve got a melange of gear that’s a headache to keep running and in sync. They’ll spend $3.5m to cover about 40 percent of the campus with N, replacing a current similar coverage area. They may expand the network and add VoIP in the future.

The university and USIW are discussing interconnecting their networks for roaming.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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Its hard not to feel bad for the Americans these days, their dollar becoming weaker and weaker, the problems with oil prices and now another blow, Broadband. As one of the worlds most developed countries it seems they are lagging behind in the area of home internet.

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A prepaid cellular phone plan has the same features to other kinds of phone plans available in the market, except for the one and only factor which is the manner of paying the bills. A post paid plan requires you to pay after using phone services. In a prepaid plan, however, you get to pay in advance for the phone service before using it.

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Aircell’s network of ground stations for in-flight broadband are operational: Now it’s just a matter of flipping switches on the right planes in American Airlines and Virgin America’s fleets. All Virgin American planes and 15 AA planes will have in-flight broadband. Neither firm has set a launch date. Aircell is calling its network “gogo.”

British Airways signs deal with BT for free lounge Wi-Fi: Starting 1-Apr-2008, all 25 British Airways’ lounges will sport free BT Wi-Fi. This isn’t exactly a trend, but more and more premium club areas in airports are just folding in free Wi-Fi as part of the membership fee. Continental fought a long battle with Boston-Logan airport about this (and won); American Airlines started providing free Wi-Fi for its lounge members last December.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

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The tap, tap, tap next to you will be accompanied by a woo-hoo! In-flight broadband is approaching, as I discuss in this audio mobile post.

Copyright ©2008 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

More: continued here