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Shock bargain WiFi roaming price of 32 Euros from Megabeam

You can spend as much as €7.5 for two hours of Internet service through Megabeam, if it's an emergency; but sign up for a year, and the deal drops to an astonishing €918 annual fee - with a second year free.

Megabeam's roaming WiFi service goes officially live Monday 11th, with a "buy one year, get one free!" special offer for Wireless Internet. It provides coverage in several petrol stations, quite a few railway stations and airports, and a pan-European hotel chain.

The chain is going live at more than 25 Queens Moat House hotels in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. The company owns the Holiday Inn franchise in Germany.

"We're in discussions with several players, to give us US coverage," said CEO Ryan Jarvis today, speaking to NewsWireless Net. "But our next target will be to make sure we can go live in France as soon as regulations permit; our customers are more concerned with travel in Europe, than trans-Atlantic."

Introductory prices start at € 7.5 for two hours' access. A day's access costs € 30 and it is also possible for travellers to buy weekly, monthly and annual subscriptions.

The monthly price is going to be a shock to rivals, particularly BT's OpenZone, which has stated that it expects prices of around £80 per month per user (€ 140 per month, approximately) compared to Megabeam's € 82.5 - with OpenZone still being a UK-only service.

To make the annual fee look even better, it comes in two forms. You can pay the full €918 in advance, or you can sign up to a monthly subscription price, which takes it a bit higher, to €1,020 - but in both cases, the launch pricing is "buy one year, get one free" making the monthly fee just over 30 Euros.

The price levels are not out of line with existing European Wireless ISP charging for travellers. A typical fee would be rather less for a day, at around ten Euros in many hotels, but with the introductory discount, corporate buyers will see the annual fee as being quite reasonable. It does, however, cast doubt on BT's pricing policy.

Recently, senior OpenZone directors told NewsWireless Net that initial pricing wasn't an issue with customers. "We're talking to large corporates, who are looking to provide a premium service to a few executives who have a critical need for high bandwidth wireless Internet," said one OpenZone director. "They aren't thinking of rolling it out to everybody in the organisation, but typically, to between a dozen and 50 members of staff in a corporation of thousands or tens of thousands."

Jarves at Megabeam agreed: "We think it will follow the pattern of mobile phones, which were seen as an 'executive privilege' at first, and then became standard issue a few years later."