Probably the largest deployment of Free WiFi is now live in New York, not something that is planned or speculated, the whole of New York City is now covered by the GOWEX network with nearly 2,000 hotspots covering Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Before this, you would probably have struggled to find anywhere in NYC that didn’t have coverage by somebody, and coffee shop surfing with your laptop would ensure you ended up with the ever needed connection to the internet. Now with the FREEWiFiGOWEX network you can have a 1Mb connection wherever you roam, which will be very welcome to tourists who don’t want those unwelcome bills with data roaming charges.
Now you might think that GOWEX are doing this for the sheer love of making people happy, that unfortunately isn’t the case and they wouldn’t be in business for long if they did. Firstly you have to download the app to make the system work, this will allow GOWEX to push out advertising based on your location which gives a good revenue stream from local merchant offers. You will also be able to upgrade your speeds and if you want more than 24 hours of access then there is a cost associated with that.
The other key revenue stream here is from offloading data from MNO’s both domestically in the US and from international operators.