Wireless wave continues to roll

Between Wayport, Boingo, T-Mobile, iPass, Gric, Cometa, and now SBC Communications, it looks like North America will be blanketed with hot spots for broadband wireless access to public and private networks.

SBC, based in San Antonio,  became the latest telecommunications company to lay out a strategy to deploy Wi-Fi in more than 6,000 locations, with a total of 20,000 access points in use. The service will be called FreedomLink.

SBC's plans sound similar to Cometa Networks' road map, which includes 20,000 access points deployed in 50 major metropolitan areas. San Francisco-based Cometa's market -- restaurant chains, bookstores, and retail outlets -- is also being targeted by SBC as are additional venues including airports and hotels especially through partnerships with Wi-Fi aggregators.

 SBC's deal with Wayport, based in Austin, Texas, will give future SBC Wi-Fi customers immediate access to 650 venues including 13 airports and 565 hotels, but the agreement will also go beyond roaming. Wayport will also manage many of the SBC services, including managing credit card and prepaid phone card use and call center support.

Through SBCs partnership with Wayport FreedomLink customers will also have access to AT&T Wireless, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless networks, all of whom have roaming agreements with Wayport. SBC also owns 60 percent of Cingular, giving the start-up service a major advantage over its competitors. This does not mean, however, that SBC or any other service will soon offer seamless roaming between wide area wireless and Wi-Fi.

Rather, users will need to click on an icon to use the service which will identify whether there is a Wi-Fi or wide area 3G network available.

"As you move from one to the other the user will be told you just lost your Wi-Fi connection, now you have to double click back onto the 3G network," according to Michael Lowden, a spokesman for SBC.

Although the competition to gain Wi-Fi subscribers is getting heated, one industry analyst said that business users will be the big winners.

"Our research shows that those who travel for professional reasons become addicted to the [hot spot] services. The respondents say they can get more work done," said Michael Cai, research analyst at Parks Associates, in Dallas.

Cai warned, however, that if SBC and the others want to sell services to road warriors they had better go through the enterprise IT department.