Upgrade column: Pooling wi-fi minutes

How often do you buy something willingly, either for business or pleasure, knowing that you will probably waste most of it? Not often - at least not for anything of any significant value. But this is often happening to today's connected traveller when trying to purchase wireless hotspot services to use at home and abroad. Bram Jan Streefland explains.

For business travellers the ability and convenience of accessing the internet while on the move is increasingly essential. Though while the advent of aggregated wireless hotspot services has solved many headaches, such as poor connectivity, multiple logins and limited coverage from a single provider, there remain problems.

One - often overlooked - is the requirement to balance cost against the benefit of being connected.

One of the main problems is that many pre-paid services - still the primary method for connecting to hotspot services - are normally sold in inflexible time blocks regardless of actual usage. They also typically expire in set, often short periods of time whether the service has been used or not.

Users want far greater flexibility. I run aggregator Trustive. Around half our customers use more than five wireless sessions per month and for around 50 per cent the average session time is under 30 minutes. If each of these sessions is conducted using a one-hour voucher it means a substantial amount of time and therefore money is being wasted.

We also find that a significant number of users, probably around 25 per cent, spend more than an hour or more online and therefore would have to purchase more minutes at further expense.

Additionally, within businesses it is normal for there to be a number of people travelling or away on holiday at once. And services cannot be shared.

But I think sharing will be a key factor in many future business services. Pooled subscriptions enable a company to purchase a bucket of user minutes. This means that rather than having to set up individual accounts for each employee to use a service, a number can share it for a fixed monthly cost.

This is perfect for organisations that have many users needing occasional wi-fi access and/or a few users who connect frequently throughout the month. It offers the flexibility for some users to use more minutes than normal as this often balances out with vacations or those experiencing a month of light usage.

Account management has to be user-friendly, of course. Details should be able to be monitored and changed online, so IT managers can add or delete users when travel habits or employees change.

Such a tool would also be likely to enable better tracking of wi-fi usage across a mobile workforce. In particular this type of management tool would make a significant difference to small and medium-sized organisations which can find keeping track of communications usage and expenditure a headache. It would also not add much of an additional resource strain on limited IT resources.

I believe it is these things together - pooled accounts that can be easily managed online - that will deliver the flexibility and cost-control end-users demand.

Bram Jan Streefland is co-founder and managing director of Trustive (www.trustive.com).