This is a combined response to your message as well as Mango's:
Yes, there are things that I neglected to mention. My response had becoming lengthy as-was. But there are also things that both of you aren't considering in your writing.
Yes, you have internet everywhere from Sprint: but you also have to pay monthly for that. Most people who don't live alone (i.e. spouse, friends, family, some once-strangers with whom you share an apartment, etc.) and in these cases it's more than likely that it's convenient to have home internet split between the parties (to power each parties separate devices (be they PCs, laptops, phones, gaming systems, and so on)).
So for most people it makes more sense to pay for a household, even in apartments, rather than per-person. In these cases getting a data plan for phone or laptop, to use everywhere.
Paying for another service to have internet everywhere is another bill to pay. As Mango mentioned, most stores (& etc.) are moving towards a system where it's free for the end users. Most people don't want to pay more, they don't want another bill. They're mostly happy using internet at home and at all their hangouts (if they're the type to sit in Starbucks on their computer, or similar locations).
As far as I can tell you're talking about the Sprint 4G system. Their "4G" system runs over WiMAX, an improvement on previous wifi systems with a much larger ranger (so fewer towers/antennae are required).
There's little in ICOA's way as far as putting up these towers goes and charging monthly for access in greater areas, aside from the cost of building such infrastructure (which is real, and fairly large (another reason it took them a while to start making profits)). I doubt they will be in that market too soon, it would certainly take time even if they do/did have plans for it, but it's not unfeasible for them to provide something extremely similar to what you have with Sprint.
Now as far as Mango's point about taking the cost away from end users, and the way this is limiting ICOA's income, I'll admit that it could limit the upper-bound of their income. But at the same time it's much cheaper for them to provide. When I said more people have devices to access wifi, you only seemed to look at the direct market: selling to these users. But one also has to look at how this can work as marketing: store owners can use this fact to bring more customers to their stores (i.e. Not ICOA's) and keep them in there longer. For many stores this is a very good thing, and they will be willing to pay for the systems and access in order to market it to their clients.
And before you ask "why don't they just go to a standard ISP and hook up a wireless router?" I'll go right ahead and tell you there's a lot more to public WiFi than that. Most locations will require customers to ask for a key, or to "sign in" somewhere so that they can keep track of who's online at what times. You need systems in place to track who does what, otherwise in many jurisdictions any illegal activities performed on the network can be pinned on the host. To avoid this (and let's face it, people will try to use these networks for various illegal activities) they need a way to track who's doing what, and when (of course while keeping everything nicely encrypted to protect certain private informations). There's a lot that goes into setting up systems like this.
So yes, few $ per location, but more locations available. This is worse than getting money from the end-user, but it still has huge potential earnings.
So, basically, it's cheaper for the consumers (the end users) because it's free. It's a less costly process for the locations considering the work involved in setting up a proper semi-public wifi hotspot. It's useful for marketing in the modern day where just about every device has wifi built in.
