Comptel: Wayport goes beyond hot spots

ORLANDO--Wayport is probably best known as the company who provides Wi-Fi networks to hotels and airports, but as Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, it has plans for much more than hotspots.

“We are a service provider and Wi-Fi is our technology of choice,” said Dan Lowden, vice president of business development and marketing for Wayport, in an interview at Comptel. The company currently has 13,000 Wi-Fi locations in 32 countries including hotels, airports and 8000 McDonald’s restaurants.

Those networks today are primarily used for quick and easy Internet access, either on a user-paid or sponsor-paid basis, but there are new applications that will take advantage of Wayport’s Wi-Fi specialty, which is in-building coverage.

For example, Wayport is moving into the health care arena, where in partnership with Catalis, it will offer hospitals the opportunity for doctors to carry digitized patient records in a wireless handheld device that can be used to show diagnostic images to patients, record doctor notes and transmit prescription orders directly to a pharmacy.

Already, McDonald’s uses Wayport to not only offer Wi-Fi access for a small fee to its patrons but also to connect its point-of-sale terminals for credit card validation, Lowden said. Others are using Wi-Fi networks for video cameras and security applications and energy management, among other things.

“The more ubiquitous Wi-Fi becomes, the better it is for us,” Lowden said. A lot of enterprises want to take advantage of Wi-Fi deployed in building to offer either Wi-Fi handsets--already used by hotel employees to stay in touch cheaply in-building--and dual-mode handsets that roam off wireless networks and onto Wi-Fi when in-building networks are detected.

While the business model for dual-mode is less clear, since wireless carriers may not want to give away the minutes they lose to Wi-Fi, Wayport’s partnerships with major service providers such as AT&T, Sprint and Cingular position the company well in the dual-mode arena, Lowden said.

“We think wireless companies will want to offer the service to keep their customers happy,” he said.