Bell Mobility Wi-Fi pilot project still offering free service

Bell Canada continues to treat free access to its BellZone Wi-Fi hotspots for consumers and business professionals as a market experiment and will continue to offer free access until the end of this year. In a wide-ranging interview with RoW, Bell Mobility president Michael Neuman admits that the service is still free and it’s being used for educational purposes. Launched late last year, the BellZone pilot project was to have run for three months offering users access to a number of hotspots located in various locations across the country free of charge (RoW, Dec. 20/02). Bell Canada transformed a number of its pay phones in high-traffic locations into Wi-Fi zones. The company planned to use the service to evaluate users’ appetite for the offering and usage patterns to determine potential pricing models. Neuman says the company continues to use the pilot project to feel out the market. "Now that it’s out there, it represents an unprecedented learning experience for us as a business to discover how people like to use, what they use, how they like to use, how much they use and even start to get a sense how people want to pay or if they want to pay or is a business case," he tells RoW. There are no immediate plans to shut the service down, Neuman says. "It’ll go until we feel we either understand it enough to launch a service out of it or decide not to and then find a way to dismantle it. But I don’t think we’re there yet." It appears as though the incumbent telco sees a bright future in Wi-Fi because the company announced on July 9 an additional Wi-Fi pilot project in conjunction with Intel Corp., Ottawa-based Wi-Fi technology developer PointShot Wireless and VIA Rail. The new trial, which is being dubbed as an extension of Bell’s previously announced pilot, will initially provide VIA Rail passengers traveling from Montreal to Toronto on trains 53 and 66 with free access to the Internet. More trains will be added in the future. Data throughput rates are expected to be similar or slightly better than dial-up speeds. Prior to the July 9 announcement, Neuman told RoW that this latest pilot project could go a long way in demonstrating the comp-lementarity of digital cellular networks and Wi-Fi hotspots. The Internet will be provided through a combination of satellite, terrestrial mobile wireless and wireless local area networks. Bell ExpressVu’s satellite network will "beam" the Internet into the train cars to onboard equipment that will then transmit data to the end-user’s Wi-Fi-enabled device. Return traffic will be transmitted through Bell Mobility’s 1X voice and data network. "The Wi-Fi hotspot pilot will provide business and consumer travelers using 802.11b enabled laptops or wireless devices with another convenient way to wirelessly access the Internet, e-mail and corporate networks," states a July 7 Bell media advisory. Last month, PointShot and Intel Canada released the results of an online survey of Go Transit commuters in Toronto in which 50% of respondents said "they would derive great benefit from wireless Internet access" if it was available on the commuter train.

Bell Mobility Wi-Fi pilot project still offering free service

News | 07/09/2003 4:00 am EDT

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