Hot Spots: Hot New Idea for Serving Customers and Generating Revenue?
By Gary Audin, Delphi, Inc.
Published Winter, 2002, Posted August 2003

Abstract:

If you’re looking for a hot new idea that will generate customer satisfaction as well as revenue, you may be looking for a Hot Spot.  Wireless ISPs or WISPs—also called Hot Spots—are coming to a crowded corner near you. Starbucks offers more than 350 locations. Wayport, a WISP vendor, serves 450 hotels and nine airports. Soon WISPs will be found in train stations, hotels, restaurants, stores, stadiums, and conference centers.

A Hot Spot is a limited-distance wireless LAN (WLAN) with public access using IEEE 802.11 standard technology. Access can be accomplished from laptops, notebooks, pocket PCs and, eventually, PDAs at megabit speed. A Hot Spot can provide full access to the Internet and the user’s personal networks without providing access to the campus network. It can also be a revenue producer for colleges and universities with sites at fraternity and sorority houses, off-campus residences, libraries, eateries, and cafes—wherever students congregate.

About the Author:

Gary Audin has over 40 years of computer and communications experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VOIP, and microprocessor technologies.

He has been an independent consultant for 25 years. During this time he designed a national bank ATM network. He specified the functional requirements for a wide area and local area network for the data transmission of the City of New York. He also designed a statewide multi-agency frame relay network for Louisiana.

Mr. Audin has been published extensively in Data Communications Magazine, Business Communications Review, Infosystems, Computerworld, Computer Business News, Auerbach Publications and 4 other magazines. He has made over 200 presentations at trade shows including INTERFACE, COMNET, INFO, PC Expo, VoiceCon and MultimediaCom. He has been the Keynote speaker at several user conferences. He is a founder of the ANSI X.9 committee. He is a senior member of the IEEE. He is on the steering committee for the VoiceCon conferences.

He has a BSEE from New Jersey Institute of Technology and graduate work in Computer Science at Syracuse University. He has presented over 2000 seminars for BCR, Telcordia, ACUTA, Nortel, Datapro Research, American Management Association, Washington University (St. Louis), Princeton, IBM, NCR, Burroughs, Sperry, UNISYS, Bell Northern Research and the American Institute of Banking. He has been an Adjunct Professor at Pace University and an instructor at Boston University.

Republished with the permission of the ACUTA Journal of Communications Technology in Higher Education, Volume 6 Number 4. ACUTA Website http://www.acuta.org.

Please note: By downloading this information, you acknowledge that the sponsor(s) of this information may contact you, providing that they give you the option of opting out of further communications from them concerning this information.  Also, by your downloading this information, you agree that the information is for your personal use only and that this information may not be retransmitted to others or reposted on another web site.  Please encourage colleagues to download their own copy after registering at http://www.webtorials.com/reg/.