Fon, AT&T Allow Roaming Across Hotspot Networks

Fon, the Spain-based network of user-contributed Wi-Fi hotspots, has its first foothold in the U.S. market, in the form of a Wi-Fi network roaming agreement with AT&T that allows users of Fon and AT&T Wi-Fi access privileges on both networks.

AT&T customers downloading the Wi-Fi International App will gain access to hundreds of thousands of FonSpots internationally.

The AT&T Wi-Fi International App, which is available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices, lets AT&T customers on either the 300 MB ($60 a month) or 800MB ($120 a month) “AT&T Data Global Add-On” package access up to 1 GB of Wi-Fi each month at no additional charge.

Also, Fon members will gain access to AT&T’s Wi-Fi network, including more than 30,000 hotspots at restaurants, hotels, bookstores and retailers throughout the states.

Fon was founded in 2006 and has a network of close to 12 million hotspots around the world. 



Image courtesy Shutterstock

Its partners include Belgacom (Belgium), BT (UK), Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Hrvatski Telekom (Croatia), KPN (Netherlands), MTC (Russia), Netia (Poland), Oi (Brazil), SFR (France), Softbank (Japan) and ZON (Portugal).

The deal also illustrates the Wi-Fi revenue model and value, for a firm such as AT&T. Access to the Fon network requires that mobile users purchase an extra international data service costing $60 a month or $120 a month.

The use of the Fon hotspots provides value by allowing users to offload up to 1Gb each month they are roaming, but the revenue is driven by the need to buy the extra international roaming feature.

According to researchers at Juniper Research, almost half of all mobile data traffic will be offloaded to Wi-Fi and other local networks in 2013.

The bigger question is how much "out and about" usage might be shifted to Wi-Fi, particularly in urban areas. That might affect the deployment of small cells that also support Wi-Fi.

NTT in Japan has tested the offload potential of dense Wi-Fi deployments and apparently has concluded that less than 25 percent of mobile data traffic can be offloaded to public Wi-Fi in the long term.

On the other hand, Mobidia already estimates a majority of total smart phone data usage occurs on Wi-Fi, for all of the top-four U.S. mobile operators, with AT&T having the largest percentage of Wi-Fi use, compared to mobile data.


Edited by Rory J. Thompson