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Last month, Ohio-based HarborLink Network announced plans to deploy a free, ad-based Wi-Fi service at BP gas stations throughout the United States and Canada, using equipment from Ruckus Wireless. The free Wi-Fi is part of BP’s larger campaign to build “a little better gas station,” looking for new ways to persuade drivers to choose BP over its competitors.

The offering is now available on an opt-in basis to BP’s more than 9,000 franchisees (which the company calls “jobbers”) throughout North America. “There’s an up-front fee for the hardware as well as the first year of service,” says Harborlink president Rick Tangeman. “We then take care of all the hardware management, replacements, and all customer service.”

HarborLink also delivers customized content and advertising specific to each location—and that’s where Ruckus comes in. “If we had done it the old-fashioned way, for us to monitor and push the content and make sure everything’s healthy, we would have had to have launched 9,000 VPNs to go out to each one of these radios,” Tangeman says.

Instead, with Ruckus’ equipment, Tangeman says, “The radios call home to us and say, ‘Hey, I’m alive—what do I need to do, what do I have to deliver, do I need firmware upgrades’… and that’s what became key on the back end. That saved us, not only in the radio costs, but in the entire infrastructure costs—which made it a viable business.”

See here for the rest of this article at Wi-Fi Planet.com.