Interesting - "Most" users don't pay directly. That coupled with the 70/30 Bus/consumer > turnaround fact = iPhone. There's just nothing else that fits the 'users pay indirectly via subscription' and 'most users are consumers' line. As the amazing success of mobile broadband dongles has eaten into The Cloud's target market of mobile laptop warriors, they had to look elsewhere. Luckily, there was an MNO with a WiFi device tailored to eat bandwidth, being sold by an MNO with a 3G network akin to a 7-year old's Meccano set.

I really don't know. The stuff people really need access to in a timely mobile context - email / social updates - can be delivered in spades by 2G/3G. The short-range data heavy lifting The Cloud enables just isn't compelling as a future business case, if it has to be on a subscription basis to work (Free WiFi = beneficial customers being a myth that retailers are realising now. The Star*ucks Laptop Squatter being the classic example. One coffee sold, the seat+table taken for an hour)

WiFi as an MNO underlay, offering iPhone-esque invisible transition? Each MNO running their own? clubbing together? Whatever the model, it's gotta be more likely for long-term success than a subscription one.

My first exprience of a "cloud" like service provision was in Adelaide (Oz) with the incredibly inovative and successful ISP turned telco Internode (the same company that caused all of the international ruckous over the Great Australian Firewall) aka Agile Communications.

They planned a complete Wifi system "CityLan" in the CBD and made it free to all customers of their ISP or partner ISPs in 2006. They also sold it as an ISP service to all of the city's residents. The idea being that nobody would want to buy personal Wifi transceivers if they had a commerically powered one right outside their window beaming in. Anyone who was an Internode customer (or ISP partner customer) could login. It extended your existing ISP contract with mobility.

However, I notice that CityLan is now free and partnered by the city council. If their business model which made me pay up (I refuse to give telco's a penny if I can) didn't work then I don't think The Cloud in London is not going to be an easy thing to sell. Adelaide is a nice compact place with straight streets and good sight lines, better weather than Paris and not much in the way of rain - work actually does happen streetside in cafes.

Obviously it might work (wifi isn't going to dissapear) but if I were in the public wfi provisioning game I would want my remuneration in up-front salary rather than deferred bonuses or share options.

Julian, your experience has been echoed a hundredfold around the world. Muni WiFi was/is the original Emperor's New Clothes. People who didn't understand it were sold promises by people who had vested interests in shifting kit / getting their hands on public funding. Often (as you point out) they ended up being rescued 100% by the taxpayer, and propped up so politicians could save face.

In The Cloud's case, it has been a data-infrastructure-poor MNO with a stonking WiFi-hungry device who has come to the rescue.

We have the same thing in my village with an 'e-office' that cost £30k to set up, and no-one ever uses.

/m

As a Open Source devotee, people do you think Open source apps will have a bigger or biggest contributions. thanx