Despite what the head of marketing at Ericsson (the phone handset maker) said recently--he told ComputerWorld this week that, "Hot spots at places like Starbucks are becoming the telephone boxes of the broadband era"--does anyone really think hot spots are going away? Coincidentally, iPass has some new numbers to back up the assertion that public access Wi-Fi is not going anywhere.
Every six months or so iPass -- which provides remote access services via dial-up, Wi-Fi, and 3G mainly to corporate customers, though anyone can buy access through a reseller like WorldwideDialup.net -- puts out what used to be called a Wi-Fi Hotspot Index. Now that iPass resells EVDO services in the United States (so you don't have to pay Verizon or Sprint Nextel directly), it's called the iPass Mobile Broadband Index.
The index looks at Wi-Fi worldwide and, as usual, iPass saw an increase in use on its Wi-Fi network, comparing the second half of 2006 (2H06) to the second half of 2007 (2H07) -- 89% growth by business users from year to year. In Europe alone, Wi-Fi use grew 142%. Phone booths, indeed.
When iPass drills down to specific types of hot spot venues, the biggest growth is in retail establishments, specifically in restaurants, which went up 238 percent year-to-year. We can probably thank McDonald's for that.
Cafes and bookstores still have the most venues overall, but they're saturated--just try to find one without a 802.11 signal--and so the growth of Wi-Fi use in cafes is way down. In fact, in the retail sector as defined by iPass, cafes have dropped from owning 54 percent of the Wi-Fi market to 44 percent as restaurants go up. Other big growth areas for Wi-Fi: train stations and ferries. (Now we need more of it on trains and on planes in flight. Aircell can't launch GoGo fast enough.)
The country with the biggest Wi-Fi growth? Brazil, followed by Germany, France, and Australia. London remains the biggest Wi-Fi city, followed by Tokyo, Munich, Singapore, and San Jose, CA.
3G service--in this case the EVDO, as iPass doesn't currently have partnerships to piggyback on any other tech in use--is measured only in the U.S., and they're basing it on just users samples to see just how much data they're pumping over the airwaves (rather than how many connections are made). New users went from using an average of 152MB in the first quarter of 2007 to an average of 190MB by the end. Experienced, established users of EVDO were using it much more, with 187MB of traffic on average in Q1 up to 225MB average in Q4.
70 percent of the connections made were full EVDO, but a majority of users--62 percent each month--had to dummy-back to using slower 2.5G tech at some point. iPass says happens when users go indoors or travel outside of the "NFL" cities, those major metropolitan areas where EVDO is fully deployed. But no one wants that. It's like going back to dial-up after enjoying that sweet, sweet broadband. Thus, only 3 percent of iPass users with this kind of service used 2.5G exclusively--and iPass thinks those people would, of course, gravitate back to using Wi-Fi.
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