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Will atheists believe in a Divine WiFi hotspot?
by Guy J Kewney | posted on 23 December 2006
God, it is said, moves in a mysterious way; presumably, logging on to hotspots when away from home. If he decides to subscribe to the Divine Wireless aggregation service, however, he's going to have to take Divine Group on trust, because it's hard to find.
Divine Wireless is an aggregator; it subscribes to a wide variety of public WiFi providers - including leading Wifi hotspot suppliers such as BT Openzone, The Cloud, Surf and Sip - and allows Divine users to access any and all of those, through Divine. It is, therefore, not going to be much cheaper than the typical commercial hotspot - but there are supposed to be more of them, with 15,000 sites claimed for the UK.
The cost for the average user could be lower, even so. Divine follows the example originally pioneered by Broadreach, before it was taken over, of only charging per minute used. Most hotspot providers sell you an hour at a time, whether you need ten seconds or the full monty; Divine charges eight pence per minute.
That makes it "not ideal" as one pundit put it, for people who want to do a couple of hours' work.
But the mystery about Divine is "who is behind it?"
The CEO, Guy Rosenhoiz, was previously CEO of an O2 subsidiary, SmartGlobal - the only other references to his business history are confusing with pointers to non-existent articles about a Guy Rosenhoiz who may well be a different person - but he has said nothing about how he raised the finance to launch Divine.
Divine's web page refers briefly to its ownership: ‘Divine’ and ‘Divine Wireless’ are registered marks of Divine Group International Limited. Finding any link between "divine group" and wifi or wi-fi was beyond Google, which also failed to find "divine group international". There is a "divine group" which is a former knitting company, which describes itself as an an investment and management group, and there's Divine Group which "has gained prominence as leading coil processing line manufacturer and sheet metal machinery specialist" - no mention of UK WiFi.
No doubt more information will emerge as 2007 unfolds.
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