Hotspots To Make Money For Resellers?
There seems to be an ongoing battle over whether or not commercial WiFi hotspots will ever make money. A few companies have tried different strategies, and so far, all of them haven’t done terribly well. The latest move is that Toshiba is trying to increase adoption of their hotspots by signing up resellers to go out and pitch restaurants and caf?s. The resellers will also be responsible for setting up the Toshiba hotspots and doing any maintenance on them. This sounds like a positively terrible idea. It adds yet another middleman to the puzzle. Half the problem with most of the commercial WiFi deployments is that you have so many different people who all want to take a cut of the action, that the final price to the consumer ensures there’s no action to take a cut from. Adding an extra middleman doesn’t solve anything – it just makes the problem worse.
