Hotspot (Wi-Fi)

A hotspot is a site that offers Internet access over a wireless local area network through the use of a router connected to a link to an Internet service provider.

Public access wireless local area networks (LANs) were first proposed by Henrik Sjödin at the NetWorld+Interop conference in The Moscone Center in San Francisco in August 1993.

Sjödin did not use the term hotspot but referred to publicly accessible wireless LANs.

The original notion was that users would pay for broadband access at hotspots.


For venues that have broadband Internet access, offering wireless access is as simple as purchasing one access point (AP), in conjunction with a router and connecting the AP to the Internet connection.

Many services provide payment services to hotspot providers, for a monthly fee or commission from the end-user income.

ZoneCD is a Linux distribution that provides payment services for hotspots who wish to deploy their own service.

Roaming services are expanding among major hotspot service providers.


With roaming service the users of a commercial provider can have access to other provider's hotspots with extra fees, in which such a user will be usually charged on the basis of access-per-minute.

Roaming agreements can be hard to negotiate with larger providers such a Boingo, so smaller hotspots usually use an aggregator such as www.gowifi.com to access these networks.

A EDCF user priority list shares the traffic in 3 access categories (data, video, audio) and user priorities (UP) (Pommer, p. 117): If the net traffic increases, then the frames of the particular access category (AC) are assigned a low priority value (e.g.

A "poisoned/rogue hotspot" refers to a free public hotspot set up by identity thieves or other malicious individuals for the purpose of "sniffing" the data sent by the user.


In order to provide robust security to hotspot users, WiFi alliance is coming up with a new hotspot program which aims to encrypt hotspot traffic with the latest WPA2 security.