In a deal that’s been years in coming, the
Boingo aggregated hotspot service now includes 9,000
McDonald’s stores: Coming on the heels of Starbucks’s switch from T-Mobile to AT&T, this is a very good month indeed for
Boingo Wireless—they’ll be adding the two biggest chain networks in the U.S., both of which dwarf the next largest network.
Boingo sells aggregated access to roughly 100,000 hotspots worldwide: unlimited U.S. access is
$22 per month, while worldwide is
$39. A mobile device service is
$8 per month worldwide.
Christian Gunning, Boingo’s marketing director, noted that McDonald’s may have a reputation for bringing in local people and consumers, but, “The McDonald’s [addition] also helps you with a subset of the business traveler group, the windshield warriors, the regional sales guys, who go from town to town to town.”
McDonald’s locations are operated by Wayport under an arrangement that they first secured in 2004 where resellers of the service pay a flat rate per location in the network rather than a per-session fee, which is otherwise common in the industry to this day.
Boingo also announced today that it had joined the
Wireless Broadband Alliance, a several-year-old international group that facilitates roaming agreements among its members, T-Mobile’s U.S. operations being the only American component. Boingo operates
28 airports in the
USA and
UK, and that gives them some leverage.
March 1st, 2008
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