Toshiba Taking Grassroots Approach
While T-Mobile is taking a corporate approach to hotspot proliferation, Toshiba is taking a grassroots approach. Earlier this summer Toshiba announced its Wireless Broadband Hotspot, a $200 HotSpot in box solution. Toshiba let's HotSpot owners set their own access prices and provides authentication, authorization and accounting. Revenues are split 50/50 between Toshiba and hotspot operator. To help boost hotspot traffic Toshiba has partnered with iPass and will support iPass' Wi-Fi roaming standard. In exchange iPass will list Toshiba powered hotspots in its directory. Toshiba plans to have 1000 hotspots lit by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see if Toshiba can hit that number. While Toshiba's model is low cost, the challenge is convincing location owners that a hotspot will make them money.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
