Hotring advertising model for broadband hotspots

The market for broadband hotspots is expected to grow with the deployment of WiFi technology becoming the standard to access the Internet in a range of mobile settings. Many businesses are entering into the market, looking at the promising prospects and opportunities offered by hotspots. Some companies are investing to become a hotspot venue like Starbucks and McDonalds, while T-Mobile, the telecommunication carrier, is providing WiFi service to hotspot venues. Toshiba and Hewlett Packard are competing to develop inexpensive and deploy systems to be used in hotspots. Despite the rapid development, some analysts are concerned about operation models of hotspots that might affect hotspot businesses in the long term and consequently, limit the growth in this area. The existing models such as the pay-per-use model are not user-friendly in terms of the cost imposed to users. Therefore, we are proposing a new hotspot model developed for local community. This model will be able to drive the deployment of hotspots in favour of the users. This paper discusses the concept of Webring used by the Internet to link Websites that have common interests and applies the framework to create a new hotspot model for local communities called a ´hotring´. The feature and structure of the proposed model enable information sharing, enabling local advertisement and announcement to be displayed on a user machine accessing the hotspots are also presented.