Redwood Shores, California-based iPass has a footprint of 20,000 hotspots on its network, i.e. provided by hotspot operators, from which a customer signing on through the client gets the iPass home page, regardless of who the operator is. Now however the company is going beyond that footprint with the Universal Policy Enforcement option on version 3.3.5 of the client.
This is for two scenarios, explained Piero De Paoli, associate director of product marketing. For free hotspots we will carry out the same policy checks once you click on our icon, while for paid hotspots not on our footprint, we’ll send you a message that this is not an iPass hotspot and that you’ll need to enter additional information such as your credit card number, then open a window in your browser for that info so you can buy an hour or day pass or whatever. Then we’ll do the security checks.
The background to this move from iPass is the increasingly competitive nature of the remote connectivity market, where network operators such as MCI, AT&T and Sprint are building out hotspot networks through aggregators to offer a similar access service globally, with a single user interface and corporate billing.
Nobody else has our DeviceID function of authenticating the actual machine and tying it to a particular user, nor this ability to enforce policy on third party networks, said De Paoli.
