Telco Wi-Fi sharing business FON stood up at a conference this week promising that its system would support 35m homespots (home-based hotspots) by the end of the year, and eventually at least 50m of them.
Alvaro Prieto, head of business development and strategy at FON, told Broadband Networks’ customer conference that he was on the verge of taking the telco homespot idea to the US, though could not name the potential partner. ‘We have many deals in place and we know that we will go beyond the 12m homes that we reach today. We have signed deals that we cannot yet speak about and we believe that we will reach 35m members during 2013,’ he said.
FON was started in Spain with the idea that each household with a Wi-Fi broadband link could opt to share that connection with other broadband homes or nearby visitors. This is facilitated by the download of software, which offers a second SSID at the home gateway, supporting public access and separate from the private, secure domain. The idea is now being copied by European and – we believe soon by US – cable operators, which are planning to offer millions of Wi-Fi homespots, potentially providing cellular offload services to mobile partners as well as adding value for their own subscribers.
Prieto said that FON is already in advanced negotiations with Vodafone, which is known to be worried about its fixed line support for both small cell backhaul and Wi-Fi offload (a factor in its bid for German major Kabel Deutschland, which still hung in the balance as we went to press).
If FON already has a deal with Vodafone it is likely this is in a market where both firms have significant presence, such as Spain, where FON originated, or Italy. In Germany Vodafone hopes to have Kabel Deutschland to provide wireline capacity and in the UK it has longstanding relationships with BT, which is one of the largest FON partners, with over 4m members.
Prieto said that deals done with cellular operators would be offered on the basis of an upfront flat fee, and a variable usage fee, with a payment cap, and that this would be shared with the telco who actually owned the customer relationships, with FON getting by far the smaller percentage. The company says that it will wait for the arrival of more Hotspot 2.0 devices in order to offer seamless handover to and from cellular devices.