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Who will pay £50 a month for public WiFi?

Following BT's announcement that it would charge £80 a month for a subscription to its public 802.11 wireless "hot-spots" the first UK rival to this service, Megabeam, has hinted that its rates won't be far below.

Megabeam's pricing has been greeted by some business managers with dismay, as has the BT offering, since a subscription to one doesn't buy you access to the other.

"We have Cisco announcing widespread European access, we have Megabeam claiming to have 3,000 European hot-spot sites, and we have BT saying it will have several hundred this year," commented one IT manager. "Each of these people seems to have agreed that a monthly subscription of well over £50 would be appropriate."

The IT director added: "We're very unhappy with public Internet access pricing for GPRS, which is costing us £30 per executive for quite limited amounts of data. This, on top of GPRS, would mean paying close to £300 per month per executive just to get the coverage offered by three hot-spot providers - with no guarantee of access in any particular area."

Ryan Jarvis, CEO of Megabeam, said that the BT pricing announcement represented a fee "towards the top end" of what he expected in the market, and said that American pricing of $60-$75 "would represent the low end."

Megabeam has not announced its own recommended retail price; it will sell through other access providers, including some mobile phone providers. But Jarvis indicated that he wouldn't expect any of his resellers to offer rates below his own RRP, and suggested that some would be higher. "Some will add value with extra features," he said.

Ostensibly, the fee is in line with market trends. Although the UK hot-spot market is not yet quite officially legal, public WiFi access has been established in many Scandinavian countries for some time.

As a result, several Scandinavian access providers have already spread into European markets. For example Kubi Wireless has signed up hotels in a large number of European cities, where the deal gives 24-hour access for 15 euros. It's a startlingly expensive option for anybody who might be staying for more than a day, and gives no access to any other hot-spot they might visit during that 24-hour period.

Megabeam's announcement is based on a deal with Railtrack, which owns the railway stations of the UK, and will provide subscribers with access in any station.

Jarvis said: "We have plans to provide access inside the trains on key routes, but that isn't a high priority. Our strategy is to sign up the high value locations - stations, airports, and so on - and there is a limited number of these, and the site owners will want to see a return."

Megabeam says that twenty blue chip corporates have already signed up to give their employees access to the service and, combined with its large number of signed premier hotspots, Megabeam reckons it is "primed to be the pan-European wireless high-speed Internet access provider of choice."

It isn't clear whether the Megabeam deal restricts subscribers to flat-fee access on a per-employee basis. Jarvis said that flat fee deals were just the first ones that people will offer. "After that, we expect deals involving a per-access element to be offered, with pre-pay or billed on usage, maybe with the mobile phone bill," he said.

Full details of the Megabeam announcement in its press release.