Public Wi-Fi Access Lacks Consistency

Computerworld - Is it really any wonder that wireless LAN service providers continue to struggle to generate a sustainable revenue stream when they pay so little attention to the needs of the end users they are targeting?
Instead, they continue to play the crude land-grab game, seeing thousands of shop fronts, burger bars and gas stations as green fields waiting to be plowed.
First, they seem to have missed the point that public hot spots are most attractive to laptop or handheld device users who are typically business people on the road trying to get access to their e-mail or corporate applications. These users are unlikely to be visiting the same location each time they want to connect. So signing up for a long-term subscription simply doesn't make sense when, each time the user wants to connect to the Internet via a public hot spot, it's likely going to be via a different service provider and therefore require yet another subscription.
Any end-user research could quickly confirm to service providers that the typical end user will want to connect between meetings, waiting for a train or plane, or at a hotel at breakfast time or in the evening. Planning a day around specific public hot-spot locations that the user has a subscription with is just plain impractical.
And paying on an as-you-use basis is simply too expensive, and managers will soon catch up with employees who attempt to expense these costly access charges. Why would a finance director sign off on employee subscriptions to five or so different Wi-Fi service providers with a fraction of a cellular carrier's coverage, instead of just signing up with a single service provider that has coverage just about everywhere?
The only solution that will work and that's sustainable in the long term is one where the end user has a monthly subscription service that allows him to connect to any public hot spot. The billing mechanism that would be required to allow this roaming feature to work must be put in place by the industry operators.
A good example of this can be clearly shown in the Global System for Mobile Communications world. Once roaming agreements were put in place among competing service providers across Europe, revenues from voice traffic suddenly started to rocket. Why? Because end users were able to make a call from anywhere, whatever the network, and were charged a premium for doing so. Did they complain about the premium? Of course. But they paid it, and traffic grew exponentially because no user