Attract More Customers/Get Customers to Purchase More Products/Services: Attracting more customers is key to virtually all businesses, and particularly retail locations. This is because much of a retail location's costs are fixed (e.g., rent, core staff). As such, each new customer represents significant profit. Likewise, once a customer is at a location, providing services that keep them in the location longer (e.g., offering WiFi service), often results in increased sales of the location's core products.

Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention: Retaining customers is critical to the success of owners and operators of all businesses. Consider the following statistics:

• Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers
• A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%
• The average company loses 10% of its customers each year
• A 5% reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125%, depending on the industry
• The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer

Location owners and operators need to focus on their core strengths. For instance, a restaurant needs to focus on preparing the highest quality meals and offering the best service. Conversely, a restaurant operator generally lacks technology skills and does not have the resources to invest significant man-hours to this area. As such, technological offerings to these customers must be easy to purchase, install and service.

For this reason, paid hotspot solutions are not appealing to most clients since to offer this service they must:

1. Choose a billing solution and back-end support
2. Purchase an access point or a "hotspot in a box" from a separate company
3. Purchase a high-speed internet connection from yet another company
4. Get end-users to pay to use the Hotspot.

Here's the irony in WiFi public access pricing: retailers can be profitable by offering free WiFi as a customer acquisition tool. But when they charge for WiFi access, these retailers, and the WISPs serving them, almost certainly lose money. Retailers are quickly learning this lesson: up to 30% of US location owners who plan to deploy commercial hotspots in 2004 intend those hotspots to be free or free-with-purchase.

The fully loaded cost of offering FREE WiFi access is less than $4/day. Operating a billable hotspot costs over $30/day. Half this cost comes from building or altering billing systems, plus the endless associated customer care. The millions of dollars already spent on systems to charge WiFi users by the megabyte, minute, etc., will never be recuperated. Someday, authentication should become cheap enough to be part of a profitable WiFi offering, but for the foreseeable future, authorization and accounting remain dangerous distractions.

Whether free or for a fee, public WiFi access provides benefits to locations including attracting customers, increasing sales, and giving customers a better experience. When it's free, it simply provides the added, and important, benefit to end-users of being free. Better satisfying customers through offering free WiFi access clearly will aid in better satisfying and retaining customers.