Business models for the free public wireless LAN service

The general public takes it for granted that it is free to access the wireless LAN outside the home and the office. Nonetheless, mobile or wireless telcos think differently. They consider that the wireless LAN access service is not lucrative at all, encroaching on the current stable revenue from legacy services. For this reason, they are neither aggressive in deploying wireless LAN infrastructure nor providing free wireless LAN access service. However, if they change their traditional view on revenue, wireless LAN service could give them new opportunities to make a huge profit even though it is provided at no charge. In this paper, we introduce four business models for the free public wireless LAN service which bring new profits to mobile or wireless telcos in different ways from the subscriber-based legacy model. Three of them are free business models presented by Chris Anderson and the other is the model used for the Kindle e-book reader by Amazon.com. In this paper, we will try to help readers have an insight, rather than elaborating on each business model, thereby they may develop their own business models.