Alister

Aiming to create a Wi-Fi Hotzone to cover the entire Niseko resort area with FON and Wireless Gate

Niseko Promotion Board has made headway in the Wi-Fi infrastructure business.

Niseko Promotion Board, Wireless Gate, a wireless broadband service provider (Head Office: Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo), and Fon Japan K.K. (Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo), the Japanese subsidiary of the world's largest community Wi-Fi “FON,” will jointly launch the project to construct a Wi-Fi environment that covers all the tourist areas in Niseko, Hokkaido, and will start providing a free Wi-Fi service to visitors in the area including inbound tourists (foreign visitors in Japan) from November 21.

In the hotels, restaurants and activity facilities in the Niseko area, WirelessGate will install, operate and support the high-performance, low-cost wireless LAN routers manufactured by FON, which has developed over 17 million spots around the world and has users in more than 200 countries.

This will enable the facilities in the area to introduce Wi-Fi at a low cost and provide a Wi-Fi service to the tourists using their facilities free of charge for a set amount of time. Because FON is widely recognized around the world, the facilities will attract more foreign tourists and improve their convenience through the Wi-Fi service. The tourists will be able to use the service easily and safely by using the Facebook login function offered by FON without the bothersome task of entering personal information.

The service will commence on November 21, and approximately 100 facilities will provide the Wi-Fi service in Niseko area before the end of this year. WirelessGate will expand the area where the routers are installed sequentially so that Wi-Fi spots will be available in over 300 facilities in the future.

■About FON
FON Ltd. was founded by serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky in February 2006 with the goal of blanketing the world with Wi-Fi. The FON community where users share their own Wi-Fi with each other has expanded as an original cloud sourcing approach and has grown into the world’s largest global Wi-Fi network, covering over 17 million Wi-Fi spots around the world. The company has business tie-ups with the communication carriers around the world including BT (UK), Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Vodafone (Spain, Italy), SFR (France), KPN (the Netherlands), Proximus (Belgium), NOS (Portugal), Netia (Poland), OTE (Greece), MTC (Russia), Oi (Brazil), KT (Korea), Telstra (Australia) and MWEB (South Africa). In addition, it has capital tie-ups with leading companies around the world including Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, ITOCHU Corporation, Atomico, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

FON’s website: http://fon.ne.jp
■Wireless Gate, (Head Office: Shinagawaku, Tokyo)
http://www.wirelessgate.co.jp
Wireless broadband service provider.
Wireless Gate combines public wireless LAN providers’ Wi-Fi access points with telecoms carriers’ networks to offer wireless communications services tailored to the needs of our users.
Their services are sold at electronics retailers and mobile phone stores.

Three main segments:
Wireless Broadband Services
Wireless Platform Services
Wi-Fi Infrastructure Business (a new business)

Explanatory meeting is scheduled as following, please attend the meeting. For queries, please contact NPB secretariat, TEL 0136-21-2551.

Time & Date:  2pm on Friday, 27 November, 2015
Venue :  Sunsports Land Kutchan
Person in charge : Shimada

by Alister