Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) said earlier this year said it would reach some 1 million public Wi-Fi access points by the end of 2014. The cable MSO beat its forecast by five months, announcing it has already reached that 1 million hotspot goal.
The company has boosted its Wi-Fi presence thanks not only to equipment rollouts in public places--such as the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn, N.Y.--but also due to deployment of Wi-Fi "smart routers" in customers' residences, which provide private Wi-Fi service to those subscribers but also turn those locations into publicly accessible hotspots for nomadic customers.
Cablevision said its Optimum WiFi service currently hosts in excess of than 250 million sessions each month. Moreover, customers average 4 GB of data per month, a number the company noted exceeds the data limits of many common cellular data plans.
"Connectivity is the driving force behind our WiFi expansion; our customers love using their mobile devices when on the go, and Optimum WiFi keeps them connected," said Kevin Packingham, Cablevision's executive vice president of product. He added that Cablevision's customers are "passing more and more data over Optimum WiFi as an alternative to cellular data plans."
Cablevision customers can sign in once and from then on automatically connect, via an automatic sign-in feature, to the network whenever they are in an Optimum hotspot.
For more:
- see this Cablevision release
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