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, 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 arm of T-Mobile) and subsequently 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 like WPMedia of the Rural Agriculture town of Kingstree SC had the notion that Wi-Fi could become the payphone for broadband. Although WPMedia Inc. invented, developed and patented United States Patent 7,035,281, <[1] (retrieved on 2007-09-20) the concept of authenication, metering and billing for public domain WiFi use, the company's implementation never expanded beyond a few hundred square miles. The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots and then expand to a completely roaming network. 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.

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.

The nature of commercial WiFi has seen a profound shift since its first adoption. Much like O’Reilly’s term “Web 2.0” has come to represent the current and next generation of web sites and web applications like Wikipedia, Craig’s List, blogging, and Google’s personalized homepage, Joshua Beil coined the term "WiFi 2.0" to represent the evolution of commercial WiFi.

Whereas WiFi 1.0 was characterized by:

• Single location, short range
• Non revenue generating or manual methods of revenue collection
• Unsecure or WEP
• No branding
• No localized content/advertising
• No gathering of user demographic data

WiFi 2.0 is characterized by:

• Multiple locations and/or mesh splash page portals
• User revenues and or sponsor-based revenues generated
• Partial or fully branded by location or provider
• Location-based content and advertising
• Survey and other tools to gather intelligence about users

A 15-page whitepaper was authored by Beil and published by several online WiFi industry websites in August 2006:

[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Free Wi-Fi hotspots

Free hotspots operate two ways:

• Using an open public network is the easiest way to create a free HotSpot. All that is needed is a Wi-Fi router. However, the disadvantage is that access to the router cannot be controlled.
• Closed public networks use a HotSpot Management System to control the HotSpot. This software runs on the router itself or uses an external computer for it. With the help of this software, operators can authorize only specific users to be able to access the internet, and they often associate the free access to a menu or to a purchase limit.

Security concerns

Most hotspots are unsecured. User data is shared as clear text as all users access the internet via the hotspot.

Some hotspots authenticate users. This does not secure the data transmission or prevent packet sniffers from allowing people to see traffic on the network.

Some venues offer VPN as an option, such as Google WiFi. This solution is expensive to scale.

Others such as T-mobile provide a download option that deploys WPA support specific to T-mobile. This conflicts with enterprise configurations at Cisco, IBM, HP, Google, and other large enterprises who have solutions specific to their internal WLAN.

A "poisoned hotspot" refers to a free public hotspot set up by identity thieves or other malicious individuals for the purpose of "sniffing" the data sent by the user. This abuse can be avoided by the use of VPN.

References

See also

• IEEE 802.11
• WarXing
• Wireless security
• Evil twin phishing