Is Wi-Fi Bleeding You Dry?

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How much money could a single traveling salesperson be costing your
company in wireless Internet access charges? The answer could surprise
you. Multiply that by 1,000 or more workers wandering around the planet
and we’re talkin’ real money here.

Let’s take the example of a single wireless laptop user we’ll call John:

• LGA. John starts his day at New York’s La Guardia Airport.
Before hopping on the shuttle to Boston, he uses a wireless service in the
terminal to download a corporate document he needs.

• BOS. Now in Boston’s Logan Airport, John logs on to a
different
wireless access point to see if a client has sent him an e-mail regarding
this morning’s meeting.

• Latteland. The meeting over, John wanders into a nearby
Starbucks to send his co-workers a report on the meeting, including
several questions that its participants had peppered him with.

• Check-in. In his hotel room, John signs up for wireless
access
to answer his e-mail and prepare a new proposal for his potential clients.

The bottom line? John’s used four different wireless services in just
12 hours. Each one has its own minimum charges and access policies.

You may think this is an extreme example, because John probably
couldn’t even set up in one day all the separate accounts that he’d need
for this kind of connectivity. But it’s not at all an unusual number of
connections for employees who’ve come to depend on Wi-Fi as an essential
feature of their laptops and handhelds.

Making a Beautiful Quilt Out of Patchy Service

Enterprises that put many workers in the field are turning to “aggregators”
— meta-services that provide centralized management and a single bill
for all kinds of dial-up, wired, and wireless Internet access, worldwide.

“For corporations, it cuts out so much fuss that they’d otherwise have
to face in managing separate accounts on separate networks,” explains
Glenn Fleishman, the editor of
Wi-Fi Networking News.

For Fleishman, the biggest solutions available for true global roaming
come down to only two companies. “There’s no one outside of
iPass and
GRIC
who provides this kind of cost-containment.”

Head-to-Head for Internet Access, Anywhere

These two corporations, which have offered dial-up and wired Internet access
for years, have recently started a pitched battle to outdo
each other in offering the greatest number of high-speed Wi-Fi hotspots.

• iPass. “We’re the Switzerland of enterprise connectivity
services,” says Jon Russo, iPass’s VP of Marketing. The Redwood Shores,
Calif., company enables its customers to use over 1,500 Wi-Fi access points
that are operated by numerous different carriers with whom it holds
contracts. That’s just part of the 18,000 total points of presence
(mostly dial-up and wired Ethernet) that iPass offers in 150 countries.

The iPass system can be configured to guarantee to a CIO that a user’s VPN
(virtual private network), personal firewall, and anti-virus software are
all
running properly on his or her laptop before it can connect to the corporate
server. Wireless service is billed by iPass at between 12 and 19 cents per
minute (with a daily cap) in North America, according to Russo, which can
represent a substantial
savings over pay-per-day fees.

The company’s clients include eBay, J.D. Edwards, and Borden Chemical. iPass
is
widely expected to raise $70 million in a rare high-tech IPO (initial public
offering) this month. Building upon its existing relationships with telcos,
iPass recently appointed T-Mobile executive Cregg Baumbaugh to its board.

• GRIC Communications. “We take away the worries from
management
about whether their commmunications are secure,” says GRIC president Bharat
Davé. Like iPass’s software, GRIC’s won’t allow a roaming device to
log on to a network unless appropriate security features are running.

GRIC, based in Milpitas, Calif., boasts 1,600 Wi-Fi access locations in 14
countries. Its pricing is “in the same range” as iPass, according to
Davé. The Wi-Fi hot spots make up a portion of GRIC’s 20,000 total
points of presence in more than 150 countries. GRIC has been publicly traded
on
the Nasdaq exchange since 1999. It counts among its clients Matsushita
Avionics, Itochu Technology, and Xicor.

My conclusion: Your enterprise may not depend on centrally managed
Wi-Fi access today. But if you don’t already have a plan for it, you may
find
that it’s being done for you. Employees may already be buying their own
cheap
Wi-Fi cards and creating an invisible roaming network under your very nose.
I’d say this is one curve you’d be smart to get ahead of.