Intera to Offer Payphone Hotspots

September 24, 2003 – Many see the venues frequented by business travelers -- airports, hotels, and convention centers -- as the only lucrative venues for public access Wi-Fi. Yet hotspots in locations such as cafés and restaurants are always growing, even though the jury is still out on their effectiveness at landing customers. But the real growth area in hotspot installations may be payphones.

Over the last year, companies like British Telecom, Verizon, Bell Canada, and others have announced plans to add access points to their payphones, turning each into a hotspot that can service nearby businesses and passers-by.

Another major payphone service provider (PSP) you've probably never heard of announced the same thing this week, and they have the potential to turn anywhere from 38,000 to 200,000 phones into hotspots.

Intera Communications Corporation (owned by Intera Group) is a telecom provider -- in addition to owning and operating 38,000 payphones, they also run the payphones found at the retail locations for businesses such as Target, Home Depot and others. They also aggregate telecommunications products for over 100,000 privately owned payphones; smaller, local payphone businesses would buy services such as local and long distance, 411-information, etc., from Intera for use on their own phones. In some markets, there might be as many as 100 business running payphones. (By way of contrast, Verizon by itself operates 360,000 payphones nationwide, the largest in the country.)

Imagine turning all of those phones into hotspots.

George Huff, the president, CEO, and co-founder of Intera, says that might happen with the phones his company runs, but they are being very conservative with this program initially.

" The reason we're taking it slow isn't how fast we can hook it up and plug it in -- we know how," says Huff. "It's a question of the success of the earlier sites -- that's what will drive how hard we push the deployment. If we install several hundred and no one shows up, we won't put in thousands and thousands [more]."

The company has already installed in a few locations, with the goal of getting a couple hundred in use to gauge the popularity. There are some installed at Burger King fast food franchises, some hotels around Disneyland in California, in some Nevada casinos, and various marinas, truck stops, RV parks, and cafés. If they see any significant usage, Huff says Intera could deploy thousands more in just a few months.

Intera's pricing is $2.95 an hour, $6.95 a day, or $29.95 a month. Some of the venues are offering service for free to see if it's popular. Intera is promoting the hotspots with on-site advertising such as table tents and windows signs. The payphones themselves are considered valuable advertising real estate by those in the movie and clothing businesses, so Huff believes the payphones will get the word out on their own. Some locations will feature a flat-panel screen and keyboard built into the payphone that customers can use to sit down and start surfing even if they don't have a Wi-Fi laptop.

The payphones will have a NetNearU WSG 4000 wireless gateway unit installed to provide the Wi-Fi. NNU's TRACKOS backhaul authentication and billing software will run the network and tie it into Intera's existing infrastructure. TRACKOS can look at the hardware and diagnose any problems, which is something Intera wanted since they currently use a similar "smart" system with their payphone network.