Will Deutsche Telekom buy a stake in Wifi hotspot provider Fon?
Hrvatski Telekom, the leading Croatian ISP that is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom, just launched a Fon partnership under the name ‘Hotspot Fon’. Like in other countries, Croatian Fonera’s can now offer a slice of their bandwidth to third parties, and can benefit from the 7 million Fon hotspots around the world.
The offer was revealed today, according to local blog Netocratic, which points out that the WSJ recently reported an imminent participation of Deutsche Telekom in Fon – the letter of intent between Deutsche and Fon has already been signed, it said. As Martin Varsavsky said on Whiteboard, telecoms love Fon because it allows them to offload a lot of mobile traffic to fixed lines, which are higher capacity.
GigaOm asked Deutsche Telekom whether this is a “precursor to rollouts in other countries”, but they declined to comment.
[via GigaOm, Netocratic]Powered by Facebook Comments
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Raf Weverbergh
Editor of whiteboard. Raf Weverbergh was a magazine journalist at Humo whose work appeared in magazines like Rolling Stone, Playboy, Mail on Sunday, Publico and South China Morning post before starting Whiteboard in 2012. He profiles entrepreneurs and businesses and loves to chat on Twitter, Linkedin or Skype (rafweverbergh).
