Boingo bulks up airport hotspot portfolio

Boingo Wireless today announced roaming deals that will expand its hotspot footprints to 36 new airports in North America and Europe, adding critical nodes in areas that traditional account for the bulk of business hotspot activity.

A roaming agreement with Opt-Fi will immediately add to Boingo’s grid hotspots covering the terminals of 20 mid-sized and regional airports in the U.S. and Canada as well as the Airtran Airways gates of 10 other large and mid-sized airports. Boingo also announced individual agreements with hotspot operators in the Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Oslo airports as well as three other regional airports in Norway. In addition, Opti-Fi will turn up hotspots in another 28 mid-sized and major airports—mostly at Airtran gates—as it rolls out its exclusive agreement with that budget airline and implements newly won contracts with individual cities.

Boingo has hotspots in 169 airports worldwide, and while they account for only a fraction of the Wi-Fi aggregators 20,000 global hotspots, those airport locations carry 80% of all of Boingo’s traffic.

“Airports are high-value locations because they are such natural and convenient locations for Wi-Fi usage, which makes adding as many airports as possible to the Boingo network a key strategy in our network deployment,” senior vice president for network strategy Colby Goff said in a statement.