Boingo partners with Tropos for roaming solution

Boingo Wireless is looking to change its notion of hotspot to hot city. Today the Wi-Fi hotspot aggregator announced it was partnering with Tropos Networks to entice the vendor’s municipal mesh-network customers into its roaming partnership portfolio.

After successfully completing joint operability testing of Tropos’s equipment and Boingo’s back office software, the two are ready to certify Tropos’s MetroZone Pilot Pack mesh gear “Boingo ready.” Tropos manager of marketing communications Brad Day said many of Tropos municipal customers are looking for ways to leverage their new hotzone networks. While cities like Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Corpus Christi, Texas, deployed their city wide networks for use by their constituents or for public safety and utility data communications, many of them are open to the idea of bringing in additional revenue from data users visiting their cities, Day said.

For Boingo, the partnership creates an opportunity to bulk up its roaming network. Boingo’s roaming systems incorporates 85 hotspot operators across the U.S., giving customers access to more than 12,000 access points. Most of those access points are in typical high-traffic areas such as coffee shops, conventions centers and airports, but Tropos’s customers are covering entire downtown areas, said Colby Goff, vice president of network strategy and business development.