Boingo bounces some fees higher, some lower

Boingo's worldwide Wi-Fi service will cost a bit more for users in Europe and a bit less for certain users elsewhere under the terms of new pricing arrangements.

Europe is a special place, as many Boingo users well know. However, the fee system for wireless in Europe is also rather special, with operators charging by the minute for Wi-Fi time even at the wholesale level.

According to Boingo spokesperson Jeremy Pepper, the company's new price hikes for Europe-oriented plans -- the monthly Boingo Global plan goes from $39 to $59, while the one-day AsYouGo pass doubles from $10 to $20 -- reflect that per-minute structure and bring the company into line with the various localized operators there.

The company also discovered the hard way that about ten percent of the service's users were going seriously over on minutes, most likely from logging in and leaving their machines connected overnight. That's pretty normal usage in the US and other places where fees aren't calculated by the minute, but a serious problem overseas, as Boingo's European partners were passing those costs back to the Los Angeles-based service. A drop in Boingo Global's allotment of monthly minutes -- from 3,000 down to 2,000 -- addresses that aspect of the situation.

But sometimes the system not only taketh away but giveth. Boingo subscribers traveling to Central and South America will now have the option of $8/session service with Boingo AsYouGo, the service's subscription-less option; the $8 fee was formerly limited to North America. And in a deal expected to be announced today, Boingo will add over 2,220 hotspots in Spain and 400 in Argentina under an agreement with Telefonica Spain -- the first member of the huge Telefonica Group to announce a deal with the company. The deal increases the total number of Boingo hotspots to over 106,000 worldwide.

All this price shuffling doesn't necessarily reflect economic strangeness, notes Pepper, who also writes the company's entertaining blog. He says the company so far is seeing essentially the same travel patterns as it did last year. "We're more than just a travel tool, but a big group of our users are business users, and they're still traveling," he told BetaNews. "And though plane travel may be down, people still have to work."

Subscribers to Boingo Global may find their increases hard to swallow, but Boingo says they'll sweeten the dose with a free year of Boingo Mobile for those customers. The price adjustments will kick in on Wednesday. Plans covering the US and Canada as well as the Asia and Pacific Rim region will remain the same.