Hotspots are venues that offer Wi-Fi access. The public can use a laptop WiFi phone, or other suitable portable device to access the Internet. Of the estimated 150 million laptops, 14 million PDAs, and other emerging Wi-Fi devices sold per year for the last few years, most include the Wi-Fi feature.

For venues that have broadband service, offering wireless access is as simple as purchasing one AP and connecting the AP with the gateway box. Hotspots are often found at restaurants train stations airports libraries coffee shops bookstores fuel stations department stores supermarkets and other public places. Many universities and schools have wireless networks in their campus.

Brief History of Hotspots

Wi-Fi hotspots were first proposed by Brett Stewart at the NetWorld/InterOp conference in the San Francisco Moscone Center in August of 1993. Stewart did not use the term 'hotspot' but referred to public accessible wireless LANs. Stewart went on to found the companies PLANCOM in 1994 (for Public LAN Communications, which became MobileStar and then the hotspot arm of T-Mobile) and subsequently Wayport in 1996.

The term 'HotSpot' may have first been advanced by Nokia about five years after Stewart first proposed the concept.

During the dotcom boom and subsequent bust in the year 2000, dozens of companies had the notion that Wi-Fi could become the payphone for broadband. The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots. Although some companies like T-mobile, and Boingo have had some success with charging for access, over 90% of the over 300,000 hotspots offer free service to entice customers to their venue.

Free hotspots continue to grow. Wireless networks that cover entire cities, such as Municipal broadband have mushroomed. MuniWireless reports that over 300 metropolitan projects have been started.

Many business models have emerged for hotspots. The final structure of the hotspot marketplace will ultimately have to consider the intellectual property rights of the early movers; portfolios of more than 1000 allowed and pending patent claims are held by some of these parties.

Commercial Hotspots

A commercial hotspot may feature:

• A captive portal that users are redirected to for authentication and payment
• A payment option using credit card PayPal iPass, or other payment service
• A walled garden feature that allows free access to certain sites

Many services, such as Boingo, MyHotZone, SurfAndSip, Nomadix, zonaWiFi, and NetnearU provide these payment services to hotspot providers, for a monthly fee. HotSpotSystem.com provides their software for free but asks for a commission from the end-user income. ZoneCD is a GNU/Linux LiveCD that provides payment services for hotspots who wish to deploy their own service.

Major airports and business hotels are more likely to charge for service. Most hotels provide free service to guests; and increasingly small airports and airline lounges offer free service.

FON is a Spanish portal that shares wireless broadband among members and sells excess bandwidth to what they call Aliens. The latter feature breaks broadband agreements that most members have with their broadband provider. Thus, commercial hotspots cannot join the FON community.

The nature of commercial WiFi has seen a profound shift since its first adoption. Much like O'Reilly's term "Web 2.0" has come to represent the current and next generation of web sites and web applications like Wikipedia, Craig's List, blogging, and Google's personalized homepage, Joshua Beil coined the term 'WiFi 2.0' to represent the evolution of commercial WiFi.^{[citation needed]}

Whereas WiFi 1.0 was characterized by:

• Single location, short range
• Non revenue generating or manual methods of revenue collection
• Unsecure or WEP
• No branding
• No localized content/advertising
• No gathering of user demographic data

WiFi 2.0 is characterized by:

• Multiple locations and/or mesh Splash page portals
• User revenues and or sponsor-based revenues generated
• Partial or fully branded by location or provider
• Location-based content and advertising
• Survey and other tools to gather intelligence about users

Free Wi-Fi hotspots

Free HotSpots operate two ways:

• Open public network is the most easy way to create a free HotSpot. You only need a Wi-Fi router and your HotSpot is ready to use. But you have the disadvantage of not knowing who connects to the router thus you can't control it any ways.
• Closed public networks are using a HotSpot Management System to control the HotSpot. These are software that are running on the router itself or using an external computer for it. With the help of these software operators can achieve that only those guest will be able to use the internet, who are authorized and they often associate the free access to a menu, or to a purchase limit. HotSpotSystem.com for example offers their software for a small monthly fee depending on the number of connections that a HotSpot uses a month.

Ad Supported Hotspots

• OpenWiFiSpots guide to 20,000 plus free hotspots in the US
• AnchorFree
• free-hotspot.com is in 14 Countries in Europe
• Google WiFi
• MetroFi
• cafes-wifi All Paris free Wi-Fi wireless Internet hotspots. Tested, photos, map. Mainly cafes.

Dual-mode Hotspots

Extending cellular indoors

• T-Mobile Hotspots
• BT UMA effort

Hotspot Security Concerns

Most hotspots are unsecured. User data is shared as clear text as all users access the internet via the hotspot.

Some hotspots authenticate users. This does not secure the data transmission or prevent packet sniffers from allowing people to see traffic on the network.

Some venues offer VPN as an option, such as Google WiFi. This solution is expensive to scale.

Others such as T-mobile provide a download option that deploys WPA support specific to T-mobile. This conflicts with enterprise configurations at Cisco, IBM, HP, Google, and other large enterprises who have solutions specific to their internal WLAN.

A 'poisoned hotspot' refers to a free public hotspot set up by identity thieves or other malicious individuals for the purpose of 'sniffing' the data sent by the user. This abuse can be avoided by the use of VPN