A month later, AlwaysON – Samsung Free Wi-Fi deal goes live

A month ago, at Samsung Africa Forum, Samsung and AlwaysON announced a deal where they were to offer all owners of Samsung Wi-Fi aware devices from year 2010 purchased within the South African Borders some 1GB free Wi-Fi for 12 months. Well, they didn’t mention when it was to commence and as from yesterday, this has finally come to materialize. In the offer, Samsung device owners purchased in South Africa from 2010 will be able to register a device for the one year access.

Process of registration:

1. Go to an AlwaysOn Wi-Fi hotspot location and log onto the AlwaysOn Wi-Fi network with your Samsung smart device.
2. On the AlwaysOn landing page under the menu option of “Free sites” click on “Samsung Registration”.
3. Enter in your personal details. Under E-mail make sure you enter an email address you will have access to on your phone as you will need to confirm the email. You will also need to enter your IMEI or serial number here.
4. You will be given your account details and can now click login.
5. You have 10 minutes of internet access, with the account details provided, to verify your email.
6. Open your mail (whichever you are using) and click the verify link.
7. Your account is now created.
8. Your login details are now stored on your device.

This process will use your IMEI to verify whether it’s indeed valid for the offer and this cannot be extended to another device as each device will need to be registered separately. You however will be able to register several devices using one account. As ecpected, if you don’t utilise your offering within the month it goes the drain way.

This is a sure way of getting more users to sign up to the subscription model Wi-Fi, just like Samsung has been doing with Dropbox for cloud storage, making users get used to it as mainstream and will almost certainly continue as a subscriber after the free moment elapses.

I wonder whether someone is thinking of such a model with Kenyan ISPs and MNOs.