By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
There is no shortage of Wi-Fi roaming initiatives out there but here’s one you may not have heard of: Publicroam. The startup is making free Wi-Fi available to guests at more than 1,100 locations in the Netherlands and is now eyeing international expansion. Publicroam’s keys to success are easy onboarding as well as simple and secure architecture with no data harvesting allowed. Publicroam is speaking at WWC Geneva on September 25.
Ever since the early days of Wi-Fi the grand vision of connecting everyone, everywhere with Wi-Fi services has had many proponents, including a host of initiatives for creating a consistent Wi-Fi roaming framework. Many of them today involve complex architectures and data extraction monetization schemes. Now Netherland’s Publicroam is – for the most part – taking the polar opposite approach.
“We’re making free and secure enterprise-grade guest Wi-Fi available to anyone with a phone at more than 1,100 venues in the Netherlands today. And we believe our straight-forward, low-cost service is something a lot of venues are ready to pay for. We’re also not selling or harvesting people’s data nor are any of our partner networks allowed to do so,” says Ted Dinklo, Founder & CEO of Publicroam.
Ted Dinklo says the question of data privacy looms increasingly large for organisations interested in becoming part of the Publicroam network. “When we started some years ago, it didn’t used to be one of the first questions people asked. Now we always get the question: What do you do with the data? The answer in our case is ‘nothing’ – and that’s important,” he says.
Another secret to Publicroam’s success is an easy and free of charge onboarding mechanism. “About 80 percent of all users sign up via our mobile app. It’s a seamless experience: Sign in once, and you’re always connected whenever there’s a Publicroam signal,” he says.
Publicroam’s business model is simple: Each client pays an initial connection fee plus a yearly service fee based on the number of client’s locations and APs using the Publicroam SSID. And the company is transparent about its pricing model. “On average, Publicroam’s clients pay around 1,000 EUR a year for the service. For a lot of venues – including many public organisations such as libraries, municipalities, museums, concert halls, and more – this is an acceptable amount,” Ted Dinklo says.
While Publicroam today is mostly used by government-owned venues, there is no reason why private companies should not offer guest Wi-Fi services using the Publicroam service, Ted Dinklo says. And there’s also plenty of opportunities for international expansion. “There’s no reason why Publicroam can’t work everywhere across Europe, for example. We’ve proven our value and our concept,” he says.
Publicroam’s authentication architecture is largely identical to that of similar roaming schemes Eduroam and Govroam, with Eduroam perhaps the world’s most successful Wi-Fi roaming platform, serving millions of university students all over the world. Govroam is a similar service offered specifically to government employees for example in Netherlands, UK, and Belgium. Despite similar technical approaches and all originating in Netherlands, the three organisations are independent.
Publicroam uses 802.1X, the RADIUS protocol, and an app to connect users to guest Wi-Fi. Users are identified via their phone number but connectivity can from there be extended to other devices, including laptops and tablets. In contrast to for example OpenRoaming, Publicroam does not require that participating networks support the Passpoint protocol, which means Wi-Fi hardware requirements are less stringent. In practice nearly any Wi-Fi network can join, Ted Dinklo says.
/Claus.
