It's not a name that rolls off the English-speaking palate, but Wixos.net is an address worth remembering if you happen to be travelling to Paris with a wi-fi enabled PDA or laptop. Until the end of June, anyone who registers with Wixos can use it at a string of new wireless "hotspots" along the number 38 bus route - including the metro station at Eurostar's Gare du Nord - for free.
Wixos will be watching all the beta testers closely. So will the Paris transport authority, RATP, which has already installed fibre optic cables in every metro tunnel. Once it has worked out how to overcome the problem of signals breaking up between wireless nodes, the authority wants to make the whole Parisian transport network a wi-fi zone - leaving mobile providers like T-Mobile and Bouygues Telecom to sell prepaid cards and do the billing.
If wi-fi takes off - and the expectation surrounding it right now is akin, a BT spokesman told the Guardian, to a "gold rush" - the biggest wi-fi players in Britain will want to make sure their customers can use it as easily as they do their mobile phones. www.bt.com/openzone is negotiating roaming deals, but won't be drawn on who with. It already has a deal with Telia to let BT Openzone subscribers use nodes in Scandinavia for a 20p per minute premium. More will follow.
Wi-fi is not cheap. The Openzone package costs between £10 for two hours and £85 a month for unlimited time online. Unless BT seizes control of as many of Britain's potential hotspots as it can, the high charges are bound to drive the public into cafes and shops where wi-fi is paid for by the owner.
Theo Platt, the director of Broadscape, wants to encourage businesses to lure customers by doing precisely that. The first two of his "virtually free" hotspots are already up and running in London. Customers who spend at least £2 in Benugo cafes are entitled to half an hour's access. He is "trying to finalise a deal with a major fast food chain and a couple of shopping malls" and, he says, welcomes the news that BT is pushing shops and small hotels to set up their own Openzone subscribers-only "hotspots in a box". "The more people have these services, the better it is," he explains. "But we truly believe in the free access model."
Some US hotel chains have already begun to give away wi-fi access in every bedroom. Omni's hotels in Texas, New York, Chicago and LA (www.omnihotels.com) are among the first.
Two other wireless providers are currently standing in the way of BT. One is Megabeam, which has a hotspot at Paddington Station. It has just been taken over by Swisscom Eurospot, giving subscribers a much bigger choice of zones, but subscriptions are still sold on the Megabeam site. A month's unlimited access costs slightly less than BT's package (£82).
The other obstruction is T-Mobile. Despite a difficult and expensive start in North America (where, online tech news site The Register claims, it is losing between $1.5m and $2m each month), T-Mobile still intends to have 56 hotspots in British branches of Starbucks by the end of May.
A couple of wireless minnows are floundering in the wi-fi market. UK Explorer operates entirely on a pay-as-you-go basis. You might come across it at Birmingham Airport. Internet Exchange's hotspots are concentrated in London libraries (www.internet-exchange.co.uk). But BT, which announced this week that it was bringing forward its target of 4,000 Openzone hotspots by a year to summer 2004, is confident its subscription model will take off.
"We don't want to be just a coffee shop hotspot," says the head of product management, Joanna Bedward. Indeed, over 2,000 "premium pubs" under the Inspired Broadcast Networks "cloud" (www.inspiredtg.com) will soon become Openzone hotspots, too. She claims hotels, airports and motorway service stations are proving the real draw. "The Hilton at Heathrow Terminal 4 is in the top 10 every week."
Go abroad, and things become much more complicated. Tracking down wi-fi hotspots is still a tricky matter. Both the Wi-Fi Alliance (www.wi-fizone.org) and 80211 Planet come up with different lists of hotspots for the same cities.
Wi-fi will soon be ubiquitous. And unless you have a terminal addiction to the Starbucks frapuccino, BT may look like the automatic choice of network. It could take the audacity of a Branson or a Haji-Ioannu to make wi-fi cheap or free. But don't trash the modem just yet. It will take a while before finding and paying for it becomes as easy as making a roamed mobile call.
