Will You Still Hate Boingo When You Understand What They Actually Do?

An image taken from the Boingo Wireless Facebook page. (Photo: Boingo)

If you’ve spent any time passing through airports in recent years, there’s a good chance you have a visceral reaction to the phrase “Boingo hotspot.”

Maybe this will sound familiar: There you were, just wanting to hop online to kill time during a flight delay, and you were confronted with the news that you could do that –– if you’re willing to pay for this Boingo thing. To judge by anecdotal evidence culled from Twitter, your reaction was probably not enthusiastic.

A sampling from the last few months: “Nothing bums me out like a boingo hotspot.” “The @boingo hotspot popping up and offering wifi is the equivalent of men trying to pick up women in the street by complimenting their asses.” “Boingo! hotspot is the actual worst please airports stop this immediately.” “Man is born free, but everywhere there is a Boingo Hotspot.” “I think the original Boingo hotspot was in hell.” “I loathe no brand more than Boingo Hotspot. They are the Carrot Top of wireless providers.”

You get the idea. Maybe you’ve expressed the idea. I’ve had my own Boingo-rage moments over the years, irrationally furious that some corporate bully was shaking me down before I could exercise my fundamental human right to kill time on the Internet. I don’t normally search Twitter for Boingo sentiment, but certainly I’ve fallen into random commiseration with fellow travelers on the subject.

In short, Boingo is an accidental icon of the digital era –– shorthand for both the wonders of mobile technology and its limits. At the same time, it’s a stealthy icon: Few of us know the reality behind this shorthand idea. So I looked into it, a process that culminated in a conversation with the surprisingly good-humored, un-hellish, and distinctly un-Carrot-Top-like CEO of Boingo Wireless, David Hagan.

I wanted to know what it’s like to oversee a brand that so many people complain about, and he addressed that. But he also explained, among other things, why I haven’t had a Boingo-rage moment lately.

When Wi-Fi was magic

The company has been around since 2001. (That’s also the year Sprint veteran Hagan came on as president.) Founder Sky Dayton, who had previously co-founded EarthLink, later recalled the initial idea: “I thought that Wi-Fi could help make the Internet as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.” Moving into airports would soon become a part of that notion. And back then, Hagan points out: “It was magic, what we did –– wireless Internet to your laptop was an amazing thing.”

Hagan took over the CEO spot from Dayton in 2004, and he knows as well as anybody that times changed. Quickly. At this point, we expect access to Wi-Fi like we expect access to oxygen –– but maybe especially in a quasi-public-seeming space like an airport. So setting up a business that stands between the people and their Internet now sounds a little like “selling bottled water next to a free drinking fountain,” as Hagan puts it. “It is a brand challenge.”

But it turns out that even Boingo has moved on from the idea that you probably associate with it: Only around 30 percent of its revenue now comes from consumers directly paying the company for the privilege of exploiting a Boingo hotspot. Another 10-15 percent comes from advertising revenue (a freemium scenario, meaning you or I would choose to watch an ad and then get free access). 

And the remaining majority comes from what the company refers to as “wholesale” scenarios. The details vary, but the upshot is that Boingo gets paid by sporting arenas, military bases, carriers, brands, and YES, AIRPORTS, for providing back-end technology that enables exactly the kind of seamless online access we all crave. The business model, in short, has evolved to be “about building wireless infrastructure and figuring out various ways we can monetize it,” Hagan says.

Some of the details –– for instance, the efficient meshing of wireless and cellular networks –– get complicated. But in many cases, pretty much the entire point of Boingo is to avoid anything that bugs the end user. That means that often you’re still connecting through Boingo even when you never encounter the brand: “You wouldn’t even know it,” Hagan says. “It’s invisible.”

The (weird) power of familiarity

Boingo has been a public company since 2011 –– under the ticker WIFI, no less. And the business it’s in now is a lot more challenging than the ruthless-shakedown scenario I’d previously imagined.

While Hagan argues that there will likely always be a “premium market” of road-warrior business-travel types perfectly happy to keep shelling out $9.95 a month or more for quick, near-ubiquitous ad-free service, that’s just not the centerpiece of the Boingo idea anymore.

And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, Hagan says that the widespread familiarity with the Boingo name remains good for business. That sounds dubious, given that in this case familiarity practically equals contempt. But he maintains it’s actually useful to making deals with venues and the like. “Literally globally, people know the company,” he says. Boingo has plenty of competitors, but “those companies don’t have brands.”

And apparently, even a brand some associate with hell or Carrot Top is better than no brand at all.

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