A fiber or cable link usually has more total capacity than each household contracts, and the router at the customer’s home is on 24 hours a day. That spare capacity is already paid for and deployed. Community WiFi turns it into revenue without touching the customer’s contracted service.
Five ways to generate revenue
- Data packages for the public. Free minutes to attract users, and paid packages by time, by traffic or a combination of both.
- Captive portal advertising. Every connection goes through a portal that can show your own or third-party campaigns.
- Perks for your own customers. Extended data away from home or discounts on premium plans as a competitive differentiator.
- Deals with municipalities and businesses. Connectivity for public spaces, venues and SMEs that want to offer WiFi to their customers.
- White label. Sell the network as your own product, under the operator’s brand.
What to consider before launching
- Router compatibility: support for multiple SSIDs, VLANs and enough memory for the tunnel configuration.
- Isolation: the public network must be separated from the private one (VLANs and secure tunnels) and never take bandwidth from the customer.
- Billing: cards, digital wallets and ideally the option to charge on the ISP’s own invoice.
- Regulation: the licensed ISP provides the physical service and is accountable for its country’s telecom and data protection rules.
- Customer communication: announce the activation in the terms and conditions or on the bill, and offer the option to turn off the public signal.
- Measurement: a dashboard with traffic, unique users, peak hours and node health to make decisions.
With Streetwifi
Streetwifi handles the technology (WAG, captive portal, authentication, billing and metrics) and works with a mixed model: a fixed component plus revenue share on every package sold in the ISP’s coverage area. See the offer for ISPs.