Wi-Fi hotspots

Posted on 14 Aug 2007 at 14:54

According to a recent survey by Wi-Fi aggregator Trustive, more than half of hotspot junkies connect for less than 30 minutes each session, and more than a quarter are online for only 15 minutes. "You always have people buying usage in one-hour slots, which often means more than half of your money is wasted because most people use a hotspot for less than half-an-hour at a time - companies are paying as much as twice what they need to," says Bram Jan Streefland, managing director of Trustive.

Signing up with an aggregator - similar schemes are operated by Boingo and iPass - makes it far easier for IT departments to keep control of expenses, while saving employees the hassle of claiming back money. "You always end up with a fistful of receipts and credit card payment slips, and there's no way to know who's using what - with any of the aggregators you can pool your minutes, so you'd buy enough for the whole company and they share the minutes between them, so there's far less waste," says Streefland.

Solution: For businesses with several employees on the road, aggregators offer strong value - they can streamline account handling and reduce costs. With Trustive, £65 per month buys 1,000 minutes to share between five employees on multiple networks. They're valid for a year and charged by the second, so employees don't waste minutes if they have to run for a train.

Free rubbish?

Free hotspots have been much maligned by the bigger brands, treated as runts of the litter, their credentials undermined by businesses whose paid-for models they threaten. "Free hotspots pose a security threat," they say, or "They're fly-by-night operators with a patchy service," but independent experts beg to differ. In a briefing with PC Pro earlier this year, antivirus guru Eugene Kaspersky said his company had seen no difference in the security threat between free and paid-for hotspots.

Certainly, free hotspot providers - whose services are often funded by advertising or the hotel or restaurant owner - take umbrage at the suggestion their services are inherently weaker than the big-name rivals. "We provide a connection that's as secure as anyone uses at home, and they [customers] have firewalls and other software support," says free-hotspot.com's Brunoli. "If people are doing business and want to use virtual private networks, we support that protocol. If you have an XP machine, you're pretty well protected and there isn't much more anyone can do to justify the cost. Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi and we meet the standard, so BT or the paid-for services can say what they like."

The big players are also quick to suggest that consumers can't rely on free operators, although it's worth noting that BT Openzone's terms and conditions don't guarantee hotspot availability. "People with access on the move want reliable access, and a commercial service can provide this, whereas others can't," says Owen Geddes, business development director at The Cloud. "They're often short term, have limits on time or, like the public network in Norwich, have only 256Kb/sec bandwidth, which is more like 3G access than broadband."

Solution: Ensure your laptop's security software is running and fully updated before using any wireless hotspot, either free or paid for. One of the most common forms of Wi-Fi fraud is the use of false hotspots: data thieves set up a hotspot with a convincing SSID nearby legitimate sites ("Coffee Shop Wi-Fi" near a café, for example) to fool customers into logging in. It's advisable to ask staff for the exact SSID before logging in.