May/June 2005

As public Wi-Fi hotspots become more common, the prospect of relying on them for mobile Internet access becomes increasingly appealing; but difficulties of "roaming" between independent networks of hotspots is thought to have held back many potential users.

There is however a way round the problem - subscribing to a Wi-Fi "aggregator", which allows you to use separate hotspot networks, but pay a single bill. An early contender in this market is BOZII, a Liverpool-based company which now offers access to over half a dozen networks.

The biggest of these is BT Openzone, which according to our latest information has over 1,300 hotspots; but other well-known names in the system include Canova, Square Mile, Ready to Surf and iyzone. International roaming has also been introduced through T-Systems.

Unified billing is a key to all this, and the company has now resolved this issue by using the resources of ServiceFactory's Orbyte system. This provides a range of service management capabilities, along with integration to its own subscriber management and open-standard billing systems.

 

There are already other more limited inter-operability schemes; for instance, BT Openzone account customers can also use hotspots of

T-Mobile (which has another 1,000 hotspots of its own) and The Cloud.

Internationally, roaming is being promoted by the Wireless Broadband Alliance, which now claims to have 25,000 hotspots in twelve countries.