Boingo CEO Weighs In On Partnering With Sprint

Sprint Corp S recently announced that it has partnered with Boingo Wireless Inc WIFI to provide free Wi-Fi access at 35 major U.S. airports to its customers. Through this partnership, Sprint customers won’t need to log in to Boingo separately at airports, but will be seamlessly connected as soon as they are in the Wi-Fi range.

Boingo CEO David Hagan was on Fox Business recently to talk about this partnership and Boingo’s plans for expansion.

The Sprint Partnership

“Our partnership with Sprint is really a vision of where we think the industry is going and that is the convergence of cellular and Wi-Fi networks,” Hagan said. “And so a Sprint customer, once we have rolled this out across their 40 million smartphone customers, will simply walk into one of the Boingo hotspots and their phone will automatically connect on to the Wi-Fi signal.”

He continued, “And then everything that customer does from that point forward goes over the Wi-Fi network instead of the cellular network and they are not billed for it nor does it goes against their data plans. So, it’s a great deal for Sprint customers. I think it’s just a sign of things to come in terms of industry convergence around these networks.”

Expansions

Hagan was asked where he is looking to expand Boingo’s services. He replied, “We focus on really large venues… We look at any kind of venue that has a lot of people going through it, big infrastructure, tougher cellular signals to penetrate. That’s a great application for Wi-Fi. So those are the types of venues that we focus on.”