A hotspot is a venue that offers Wi-Fi access. The public can use a laptop, WiFi phone, or other suitable portable device to access the Internet. Of the estimated 150 million laptops, 14 million PDAs, and other emerging Wi-Fi devices sold per year for the last few years, most include the Wi-Fi feature.
For venues that have broadband service, offering wireless access is as simple as purchasing one AP and connecting the AP with the gateway box.
Hotspots are often found at restaurants, train stations, airports, libraries, hotels, hospitals, coffee shops, bookstores, fuel stations, department stores, supermarkets and other public places. Many universities and schools have wireless networks in their campus.
History
Wi-Fi hotspots were first proposed by Brett Stewart at the NetWorld+Interop conference in The Moscone Center in San Francisco in August 1993. Stewart did not use the term 'hotspot' but referred to public accessible wireless LANs. Stewart went on to found the companies PLANCOM in 1994 (for Public LAN Communications, which became MobileStar and then the HotSpot unit of T-Mobile USA) and Wayport in 1996
The term 'HotSpot' may have first been advanced by Nokia about five years after Stewart first proposed the concept.
During the dot-com boom and subsequent bust in 2000, dozens of companies had the notion that Wi-Fi could become the payphone for broadband. The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots. Although some companies like T-mobile, and Boingo have had some success with charging for access, over 90% of the over 300,000 hotspots offer free service to entice customers to their venue.[citation needed]
Both paid and free hotspots continue to grow. Wireless networks that cover entire cities, such as municipal broadband have mushroomed. MuniWireless reports that over 300 metropolitan projects have been started.
Many business models have emerged for hotspots. The final structure of the hotspot marketplace will ultimately have to consider the intellectual property rights of the early movers; portfolios of more than 1000 allowed and pending patent claims are held by some of these parties.
Commercial hotspots
A commercial hotspot may feature:
* A captive portal that users are redirected to for authentication and payment
* A payment option using credit card, PayPal, BOZII, iPass, or other payment service
* A walled garden feature that allows free access to certain sites
Many services provide payment services to hotspot providers, for a monthly fee or commission from the end-user income. ZoneCD is a Linux distribution that provides payment services for hotspots who wish to deploy their own service.
Major airports and business hotels are more likely to charge for service. Most hotels provide free service to guests; and increasingly small airports and airline lounges offer free service.
FON is a European company that allows users to share their wireless broadband and sells excess bandwidth to outside users (Aliens). Since this may breach users terms of service FON has agreements with many broadband providers / ISPs.
One of the companies is TravelNetCon - international high speed Internet HotSpot mediator.
Billing
The so called "User-Fairness-Model [1]" allows a volume-based billing, with only the payload (data, video, audio) will be charged. Moreover, the tariff is classified by net traffic and user needs (Pommer, p.116ff).
If the net traffic increases, then the user has to pay the next higher tariff class. By the way the user is asked for if he still wishes the session also by a higher traffic class. Moreover, in time-critical applications (video, audio) a higher class fare is charged, than for non time-critical applications (such as reading Web pages, e-mail).