Finnish phone network operator expanding their Fon-like service overseas

Published by krisse at 11:48 UTC, June 10th 2008

Another one of those Interesting Things Which You Might Not Have Noticed: the Finnish phone network operator Saunalahti has a service called Wippies with the same idea as Fon. You order a free Wippies Wi-Fi router which lets all Wippies members access your home connection wirelessly, and you can access theirs, with the aim of building a free nationwide or worldwide service. It was initially just an experiment in Finland last year, but it's now expanding to cover other countries too, with Sweden, Denmark and most recently Estonia joining the network.

What's unusual about this is that the backer of Wippies is Saunalahti, which is one of Finland's biggest and most successful phone network operators. You'd think they would be nervous about people using their phones to make free Wi-Fi VOIP calls, after all many American and British networks have tried to disable VOIP and Wi-Fi in phones. By contrast, Saunalahti seems to be not only embracing Wi-Fi but actively giving away the necessary hardware and encouraging people to open their connection to others.

It's difficult to know how Saunalahti expects to make money from this, though. Perhaps they eventually intend to follow Fon's lead of offering Wippies access to non-members for a small fee, which is then shared between the owner of the router and the company itself.

You can click here to see a map of the location of current Wippies boxes. One or two are in countries where Wippies hasn't officially launched yet, which perhaps indicates tests for future expansion?

News Discussion

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisse Some people have suggested they will charge for access to non-members, but there's no mention of that on the Wippies website.

Yeah, the website isn't exactly the most uptodate/user friendly/well maintained. (Huge, quick-ish expansion with too few people employed on the project?)

But I can confirm that at least in Finland the pay-for-access works. Whenever you connect to an open wippies wlan your browser is routed/captured/whatever it is called to a wippies portal page where you can either log in with your wippies userID, OR pay for access by sending an SMS (costing a few euros for a few hours) with a code (specific to that wippies' box).

How or if this model works/will work in other countries I have no idea - the model of paying for services by SMS is limited by the operators cooperating, is it not?

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