Pronto, Tropos Team Up

“Dating” in two cities turns into serious relationship between Tropos and Pronto: It’s a natural partnership, and one we expect to see more of as metropolitan area networks or larger hot zones develop. Pronto handles the back-end and the front-end: user experience, account management, authentication, and other details of sessions. Tropos builds the infrastructure, maintaining the hardware. Neither company should specialize in each other’s fields.

This kind of strategic relationship could, of course, lead to firms that have separate managed services divisions through mergers and acquisitions so that they can offer equally good infastructure and AAA support. Many of the hotspot operators provide the back-end and the build-out, like Wayport, but the scale they’re supporting is building-wide, not city-wide (yet).