Commercial hotspots (For WIFI Technology)

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