We’d love to show you around our Hotspots here in NYC if you make it out here.

Thanks for posting my response.

I understand your pessimism with regards to the technology, but our solution is markedly better than that of our competition, and also significantly more affordable. I have used some of our competitors’ solutions and was glad that we have put a lot of time into creating a product that gives a great ad supported surfing experience for our users.

With regards to issues accessing secure sites, our product does not intercept SSL requests. I have seen ssl cert warnings on our competitors’ products that indicate their device certificate was being passed back. Proxying ssl content via man in the middle is something we don’t do; it is unethical, and we respect the privacy needs of our users.

We leave it up to the network owner if they want to lock the access point down. The default configuration is open except for port 25. Most of them leave it open, but there are those who block off all ports except for 80 and 443 and it can cause VPN issues. But it is their network, and their choice.

I don’t know much about the logistical challenges of deploying a wifi network in NYC park since I don’t live there. But the costs you are quoting there are comparable to what I have seen for some of our customers that have city wide networks. Several of them are turning a profit on their networks. It takes a few months to build the user base and the ad inventory.

I don’t know if an supported network is right for your needs, and didn’t mean to imply that was the case. I was merely offering an alternative viewpoint to your claim that ad supported wifi networks are unsustainable.

I’d love to check out your network, I haven’t been to New York in about four years.

Its good to see your company trying to make Advertising work, but your solution are still not proven to be successful. The type of usage that is seen in a NYC park and the environment doesn’t allow a $29 access point to be installed, nor does it allow a mesh network to be easily deployed. There are other significant costs as well, not the least of which is that of internet access from an ISP (which at >$100/mo can add up). Plus there’s support and maintenance, which would be higher for cheap $29 APs versus a commercial AP that costs $200-$400 (our routers live outdoors in terrible snow, driving rain, and oppressive heat, and we haven’t had a need to replace any of them yet).

So real costs are on the order of at least $2000-$3000/yr/hotspot hardware and maintenance + $1000-3000/yr for internet access. Given the impressions that a hotspot provides, any model we’ve seen for Ad revenue wouldn’t cover the costs.

Plus, the type of advertising solution your company offers is annoying and frustrating to users at best, and highly problematic at worst, since you are actively rewriting the HTML that gets delivered to customers via their web browsers. We investigated similar solutions in the past and have determined that they would cause more problems then they would solve, they would interfere with the access of secure sites, they would create issues with accessing certain VPNs, and they would generate a lot of support requests from users who had problems.

Unfortunately, your proposed solution is neither proven nor viable for NYC Park Hotspots, and I suspect that while you may see success in private deployments or smaller communities, without serious centralized support (which is exactly what DoITT is proposing to not have, and we are telling them they need to provide) such solutions have no possibility of succeeding in NYC and other similar cities.

There have been failures in creating sustainable WiFi networks based on advertising revenue. That’s a fact. But there have been successes also. My company has built it’s business on this model, and to date our largest customers are profitable, and sustainable.

It isn’t easy to create a WiFi network that is profitable just on advertising. But it is possible, and we are getting very good at it.

When you lower the cost of implementing the network by using low cost commodity hardware, and partner with local businesses to give them an effective means of advertising to local users, you have a solution that works. And is sustainable.

The ad sponsored wifi market, just like the majority of emerging high tech markets, saw early failures with companies that got to market too soon with solutions that were too costly to be sustainable. Putting a $1k transmitter on top of a light pole, and charging a local business $1k per month to get limited advertisement space and return was a bold effort by pioneers in the market, and most of them ended up with arrows in their backs.

Putting dozens of $29 access points around a city in a mesh configuration, and giving local businesses the opportunity to sponsor the network at prices starting at $100/month is the way to a sustainable WiFi network. I know, because we have accomplished this for our customers in several deployments.

Central Park Wi-Fi has been disabled for about 1/2 a year now. See our article on Wi-Fi Salon shutting down (they ran the Park’s Wi-Fi Concession).

As for the TV Network link, which was called CBS Mobile Zone, and it was never successful. We’ve heard from numerous people in the past couple of years that it was only sporadically available, and CBS never did anything with it other than make a big announcement. I’ve just assumed it quietly faded away, and I haven’t heard anything about it for at least the last 6 months.