Free Wi-Fi Hotspots Outnumber Paid Hotspots

Because Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, and McDonalds, all provide free wi-fi hotspot access, I was not surprised when I read an article on Gigaom that free Wi-Fi hotspots now outnumber paid hotspots, making up 55.1% of the public Wi-Fi hotspots tracked by JiWire. The implementation of Wi-Fi at retail locations like Starbucks has existed for several years now, but many of those locations were using services provided by commercial networks. My guess that the retail providers have discovered that there is little money to be made in charging for the access, and it has probably started to cost them more to manage the subscription services than it is to just provide the service for free.