What Does the Future Hold for Fixed Wireless ISPs That 
Want to Provide Roaming Services to Their Customer Base?

How Gric, iPass and Boingo plan to bring true roaming portability to the 802.11b fixed wireless world.

By Tim Sanders 

The Future is Almost Here

            Until recently fixed wireless Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) remained islands in the sea, isolated from each other without any roaming capacity. Dial-up providers possessed national and international roaming capability for years, but broadband providers haven’t been able to hope for similar capabilities. Without significant roaming capability, mainstream acceptance of license-free wireless remains in abeyance.

            With the advent of Gric, iPass and, recently, Boingo, the potential for a better future is here. Broadband access, particularly, fixed wireless access has remained as a niche market service, without widespread availability. That is changing due to the convergence of several new technologies and initiatives. The approaches that iPass, Boingo, hereUare and Gric are taking to knit these disparate networks together are one major initiative. 

            Two of these companies have been around for several years, but many wireless ISP providers are not familiar with these firms and the potential they offer the fixed wireless community. That is changing, and interest in the industry is growing. Questions, however, remain: What exactly are these companies doing; why does it make sense for wireless ISP’s, and how does it actually work?

What They’re Trying to Do

            As in dial-up roaming, broadband end-user customers access the Internet from multiple 802.11b locations around the nation and world as if they were at home. From that point these three aggregators business models differ. Boingo developed a more consumer-oriented model whereby it retains ownership of all roaming customers. Boingo serves as the customer’s ISP and then purchases wholesale bandwidth from whichever local wireless ISP provisions their clients. Boingo’s business model compensates the ISP (Managed Network Provider in Boingo parlance) with a share of the revenue generated at the site.

The iPass and Gric models leave customer ownership with the local ISP (unless a customer signs directly with iPass or Gric). That local customer pays their home fixed wireless carrier a retail price for roaming access, regardless of where they roamed. The local carrier pays a wholesale price to Gric or iPass for the access. Gric and iPass, in turn, compensate the ISP who actually provided the roaming access at a wholesale price.

The basic concept is a great idea. It’s also fairly simple. What hasn’t been so simple is actual deployment for various reasons. U.S. Fixed wireless technology has suffered from setbacks recently, and common standards still elude the industry. The recent upsurge in Wi-Fi popularity presages a very positive trend.  This common standard, coupled with much cheaper and improved access cards, offers travelers real national and international roaming capability with 802.11b.

Gric, iPass and Boingo possess particular strengths. Deciding which one can be the best partner takes a bit of homework. More certain is the notion that partnering with one of them is a smart thing to do.

Why Independent Wireless ISP’s Should be Interested

            Fixed wireless providers, using both 802.11b Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) technologies, need a national and global roaming partner. More importantly, these roaming connectivity providers need fixed wireless access partners. The reasons are numerous and compelling:

            Roaming providers need subscribership growth. To do that, iPass, Boingo and Gric need to increase their footprint of hot spots to be attractive to customers. Someone must provide the customers who will travel to these places. Fixed wireless ISP’s, particularly in towns where travelers originate, can provide those subscribers.

            Fixed wireless ISP’s need new sources of revenue and ways to differentiate their offerings from the competition. 

The opportunity to earn roaming fees from Tier 1 city visitors to a small town wireless ISP may remain small for quite some time. However, the income generated from local travelers going to Tier 1 hot spots may not be. For these reasons, the value of the Boingo model for small town providers may seem unclear at first, but other considerations may take precedence.

The business case of the “Last Mile” is always the rub in any access equation. Someone must make money in order to invest in deploying a hot spot in a hotel or café. The Boingo model should be appealing to venues, particularly hotels, seeking to draw guests. A case can be made that roaming agreements enhance the value proposition of the local carrier and the venue to potential local customers. Offering broadband roaming for local customers, even to limited areas, can be the weight that swings a valuable new customer to your ISP. The value of leveraging more local customers may override the loss of roaming income in the Boingo model. It’s important to note Boingo already has more wireless hot spots than the other two carriers and will pay bounties to venues and ISP’s for new customers.

With iPass and Gric, business travelers are the natural first customers for roaming access. The areas they are likely to travel to correspond nicely to the metropolitan areas being added first. Business customers generate more revenue for the local wireless ISP. Even FHSS wireless ISP’s can benefit from a roaming agreement by selling DSSS cards to their customers for use while traveling.

“The details for working with FHSS carriers haven’t been worked out yet,” said Christian Gunning, Director of Product Management for Boingo. “We’re open to working with them if they are considering deploying DSSS hot spots at the end of their network.”

 Currently, neither Gric nor iPass have many wireless hot spots relative to Boingo, which tends to bring their models into question too. As with Boingo, other considerations may take precedence. Both companies are working hard to improve this, and both currently offer significant dial-up POPs along with ISDN and some wired broadband POPs. Offering a traveling customer remote access to his local network, even with slow connections, is compelling, and, next month, the Inter-touch and Wayport wireless networks come online in lobbies and hotel rooms with iPass as a partner.

The Business Case

            Each of these three companies has unique strengths. Gric and iPass are more established with strong dial-up and ISDN roaming capabilities. Additionally, iPass supports wire line services. Gric is working on the same. Boingo is a pure play 802.11b wireless roaming aggregator. Gric and iPass each boast from 14,000 – 17,000 worldwide POPs of all kinds. Both companies have significant international presence but minimal wireless presence in the US. Each serves 150 countries and are launching wireless POPs in the US. Boingo, the newest player, focused exclusively on fixed wireless hot spots, and its growth curve of wireless POPs exceeds iPass and Gric’s already, but it has no dial-up or wire line capabilities. None of these companies are focused on citywide types of wireless networks. They are open to doing more with assistance from local fixed wireless companies however. Boingo has been most aggressive move in acquiring fixed wireless footprint, but the other carriers seem willing to compete.

            Gric has an aggressive stance in the face of Boingo’s growth.

            “We’re very hungry to grow fixed wireless footprint,” said Perry Lewis, Manager of Corporate Business Development for Gric. “If you’re an 802.11b carrier or even Frequency Hopping we’d like to talk to you.”

            “The scale of what we’re trying to accomplish made it prohibitively expensive to market to Tier 2, 3 and rural market fixed wireless companies so far,” said Chris Richards, Director of Business Development for iPass. “We’re trying hard to grow footprint in markets drawing heavy traffic, but are open to smaller markets too. Frankly we would appreciate more phone calls from fixed wireless carriers in general.”

             So, the question remains: Who to choose from? It is helpful to look at some of the details of how these companies deliver service and partner with wireless ISP’s.

Authentication

            The first of these players to launch was iPass. At the time finding hot spots supported by RADIUS or other servers handling AAA (Authorization, Authentication and Accounting) was not common.

            “Early on, we found that most locations simply had extended LAN’s so we learned to support clients without existing authentication capability,” said Richards. “More recently, most of the firms we work with already run RADIUS or something similar. It makes it easier to deploy. We believe we have the best security for linking AAA servers in the business.”

            Boingo and iPass use software applications primarily. Gric Communications sometimes uses a different method.

            “Certainly customers with existing AAA servers are welcome,” said Lewis. “However, lots of wireless ISP’s use WLAN security to authenticate so we are prepared to put a AAA server in if necessary.” Depending on the potential for business, Gric may cover part of the cost of the server with the ISP. Gric's Wireless Datasheet

            Boingo, in the short term, is focusing on ISP’s that already have AAA setup.

            “We have grown so quickly that, just to meet the demand, we’ve been forced to focus on partners who have existing servers to link to,” explained Gunning. “We always try to be flexible but part of what we are doing is trying to build a homogenous system to foster fast growth.”

Billing Systems

             The process of dealing with another billing process scares many wireless ISP’s, but all of these companies have strong billing systems. Gric and iPass allow the home ISP to bill the end user at the retail price of the ISP’s choice. Then wholesale prices for services purchased or sold are handled between the ISP and the roaming aggregator. Who provides the wholesale usage information varies from company to company.

Boingo designed its system for high redundancy. The ISP maintains billing records and supplies a wholesale invoice to Boingo who also tracks billing separately. Boingo compares the two records to reconcile the wholesale billing.

            “We believe it is inherently more fair to both companies if we each track billing and then reconcile the statement,” said Gunning. “Either way, the end-user is billed based on the usage record they access online at retail prices. That’s a given.”

            At iPass tracking is done by iPass, but they recommend ISP’s maintain separate records for backup.

            “At iPass we provide a wholesale bill to the ISP with complete statistics on the usage, but redundancy is always good,” said Richards.

            Gric chooses to handle billing in turnkey fashion. Gric provides a statement and handles all of the clearinghouse functions. They provide a wholesale bill to the ISP partner indicating the user’s ID, where they roamed, at what time and for how long.

            “We give the access partner everything they need to bill its customers,” said Lewis. “Maintaining separate records isn’t necessary unless the ISP just wants to.

Pricing

            Boingo’s pricing is set by Boingo and is available on its website. Hot spot providers are paid a portion of this for wholesale access. It’s a very straightforward system based on connect days. Customers can connect for 24 hours at any location for a flat rate and can log on and off at that location several times. Changing locations in a short period of time results in a second connect day charge even for brief logons. Both are still good for 24 hours. The company also offers an unlimited access plan.

            The iPass suggested retail price corresponds to the price it charges its direct customers. However, the local provider is free to set retail pricing to its roaming customers. Wholesale broadband access is also charged or paid for on a connect day basis by iPass, but dial-up access is priced on a usage model.

            Gric relies on a usage model for both broadband and dial-up access to price its wholesale partners. However, it feels that ISP’s should be free to charge whatever they wish to the end-user. Gric has partners with connect day pricing systems and others who price by usage.

            “We can advise wireless ISP’s on retail pricing, if they wish, based on statistics we’ve collected on usage patterns,” said Lewis. “However, we prefer to leave the final decision to the ISP.

Security

            The three aggregators provide data center and AAA security authentication. With slight variations authentication is linked to mirror the end-user’s home system. For Gric and iPass that would be the local ISP’s authentication screen or their own for direct customers. Boingo customers consistently see the same interface at all times and Boingo’s server interlinks with the local hot spot provider’s servers.

            Each company appears to have, at the very least, adequate network security although iPass maintains that their security setup with wholesale partner AAA systems is exceptional. The iPass authorization system is centralized versus a shared secrets system where authorization is shared back and forth between the partners resulting in a stronger security process. From Stratecast 2001 report

            Wireless security is still the rub. The good news is that there is some, especially if WEP is turned on in the card, because all three end-user applications provide VPN client support and two support personal firewalls. The issue is less with security between the end-user roaming application and the POP, but more with securing other existing customers the wireless ISP has. With public roaming in place, the potential increases for intruders to access the wireless provider’s security more easily.

            For example, all of the applications clearly show the SSID of the public AP’s. If a provider does not use a more cryptic SSID system for the balance of its non-public network or NAT firewall routers for local wireless customers, compromises are certainly possible. Boingo, iPass and Gric all re-iterate that security is very important and they are working on improvements constantly.

The End-User Application

            Boingo’s application is the hands down winner for simplest interface and setup path for a wireless connection. It can configure the wireless card’s SSID and MAC address identifier automatically for the customer and incorporates scanning capability to search for local Boingo network AP’s or local 802.11b free nets. The software incorporates a VPN client for added security, but Boingo recommends a stand-alone personal firewall. The application provides some connection quality statistics. For strictly wireless access, it’s a best of class application.

            Gric’s application is simple and clean in the dial-up version, but users must contact Gric for the broadband wireless application, which is virtually identical. It supports both firewall and personal VPN clients. The primary drawback is that end-users must manually configure the wireless card for each new AP association. A strong asset however, is the extensive dial-up and ISDN access numbers in the application.

            A tab system defines the iPass application and offers end-users a choice of Modem, ISDN, Wireless Broadband or Wired broadband. As with Gric’s application, the SSID and MAC info must be manually configured on the card. The strength of this application is also in its extensive dial-up and ISDN capabilities. As iPass adds more extensive wired and wireless POPs the variety should be impressive. Currently iPass’s application supports both the Black Ice and Zone Alarm personal firewalls and VPN client capability. 

            Neither Gric nor iPass’s applications appear to support network scanning as Boingo’s application does.

What the Fixed Wireless ISP Needs to Do

            To work with any of these companies successfully a wireless provider must understand the focus of each. How that focus meshes with the ISP’s business model is very important. The ISP’s consumer to business customer mix, location and hot spot potential should all affect its choice in how to proceed.

            The fixed wireless ISP needs to retain responsibility to ensure the security of its local wireless customers. 

            Each aggregator requires a Service Level Agreement (SLA) built around uptime requirements. All three companies provide technical support, and Boingo handles all three tiers. The aggregator must be able to ping the AP on the carrier’s network at a minimum. Read-only access to the carrier’s SNMP management system is ideal.

            Providers in smaller towns should consider making the first move to contact the aggregators. There are several reasons for this; prime amongst them being that there are few comprehensive lists of Wi-Fi capable carriers available, and the aggregators may not know a carrier is out there.

            Realistic expectations of the current limitations of broadband footprint are strongly advised.

Who’s The Big Winner

            The big winner in the end is the fixed wireless industry and its customers. Every successful startup and initiative raises the public perception of wireless as a reliable broadband option. New capabilities for wireless providers, such as ubiquitous roaming, help cement the public understanding that fixed wireless may be the best option. In the end, to succeed, fixed wireless providers must become, and remain, financially successful by choosing good partners that increase its bottom line.

About the Author: Tim Sanders is founder of The Final Mile, a fixed wireless consulting firm and gained his experience with a multi-state fixed wireless ISP. He can be contacted at tim@thefinalmile.net 

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