History of wi-fi (Wireless network)

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