WiFi Roaming: Will The Aggregators Or The Carriers Win?
An interesting article looking at the issue of roaming across different WiFi networks and wonders if the roaming question will be answered by aggregators or by carriers. The aggregators have a head start, signing up plenty of places to include in their network, but the carriers could just sign a few roaming deals with each other, and offer pretty wide coverage at some point. The aggregators are doing their best to build their networks in a way that the carriers simply decide to partner with them, but that just adds yet another middleman trying to get an increasingly tiny piece of pie. Over time, it may be increasingly difficult for the aggregators to prove their worth. The carriers have much stronger marketing budgets and the ability to simply include WiFi access with one of their other (more popular) service offerings. Of course, all of this assumes that paid WiFi access is definitely the way things are going to be, and ignores the idea of free WiFi access.
