New Zealand company Tomizone has signed an agreement with iiNet Limited, Australia's third largest ISP. Tomizone offers Wi-Fi Hotspot services for high-speed shared wireless Internet access.
The agreement means that Australia will have the Tomizone Wi-Fi Hotspot solution available to iiNet customers to grow the Tomizone Hotspot network. An added incentive of giving iiNet customers 100 megabytes monthly Wi-Fi access to Tomizone Hotspots anywhere around the world is also part of the agreement.
One of the unique aspects of this arrangement is that iiNet broadband customers will be able to set up their own Wi-Fi Hotspot by connecting a Tomizone-enabled Wi-Fi device to their broadband connection to securely share access to the Internet. The Hotspot owner can then generate income from other users who pay a low fee to access the Internet. Half of any usage revenue earned will be distributed to the iiNet customers who operate a Tomizone.
This is very similar to the agreement signed earlier this year with New Zealand ISP, Orcon.
Tomizone is a simple Wi-Fi Hotspot solution with its free hotspot-enabling firmware embedded in selected Wi-Fi routers. When Tomizone is activated on the Wi-Fi router, the Tomizone service authenticates customers’ access, regulates usage, and collects payments. It distributes 50% revenue share to the Hotspot owner. The Hotspot owner could also choose to offer free access to friends using a “friends list” built in to the software.
iiNet customers will be given a free data allocation of 100Mb per month, if they exceed this allocation, then they will be able to “top up” their plan. Greg Bader, CTO of iiNet says the company have already started work on integrating the systems, with a target release date for November 2007.
According to JiWire, a leading Wi-Fi hotspot locator service, there are around 1,900 public access hotspots in Australia.
