Airpath launches Wi-Fi clearinghouse

Hot spot aggregator Airpath has launched the Wi-Fi industry’s first hot spot clearinghouse, providing a common interconnection between carriers and potentially thousands of hot spot providers.

Called InterRoam, the service is designed as both a common meeting point for carriers to find hot spot providers to establish roaming agreements and as a neutral back-office platform that manages the complex contracting, rating, billing, settlement and clearing between those providers.

"This facilitates the people with customers finding people with networks, and it also serves as a meet-me location where carriers with no footprint can buy access," said Laura Mellow, Airpath vice president of marketing and product management.

Airpath’s own Airpath Provider Alliance, a 600-provider network with more than 3500 hotspots worldwide, will join the network as a single member with pricing standardized across its membership. In addition, BT Openzone--British Telecom’s hot spot operation in Ireland and the U.K.--and airport hotspot provider Opti-Fi have hooked into the InterRoam network offering their hotspots up to any carrier wanting to negotiate a deal.

While carriers can establish roaming relationships with hot spot providers separately--and many of them have--the prospect of interconnecting to multiple providers and handling the billing and settlement between each of those partners is a daunting prospect, Mellow said. Airpath believes a clearinghouse approach will eventually break down the barriers to having vastly interconnected networks in which roaming is the norm instead of the exception, Mellow said.