Greater Smartphone & Tablet PC Use To Drive 350 Pct Rise In Global Hotspots

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 9 (Bernama) -- Public Wi-Fi hotspots are set to grow by 350 per cent from 1.3 million around the world today to 5.8 million by 2015 following greater use of smartphones and tablet PCs, said the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA). WBA, which focuses on driving the next generation Wi-Fi experience, said mobile data growth was a key factor in the rapid build-out of Wi-Fi hotspots. This forecast does not include "community hotspots", where users share their own Wi-Fi access point with others, which add an additional 4.5 million hotspots worldwide, said the industry association in a report compiled by analyst firm Informa Telecoms & Media from a survey of 259 service providers and Wi-Fi vendors. The survey found that smartphone connections to Wi-Fi hotspots will soon overtake laptops globally. Laptops now represent less than half (48 per cent) of the connections to hotspots, smartphones account for 36 per cent and tablets 10 per cent. In the Asia Pacific and North America, smartphones already outnumber laptop connections to hotspots. WBA's report also highlighted that global mobile data traffic was expected to reach 16.84 million terabytes by 2014. "Operators plan to manage the impact of this growth primarily through new pricing strategies and Wi-Fi-based offload," it said. WBA said China Mobile planned to deploy a million hotspots and Japan''s KDDI aimed to grow its 10,000 Wi-FI hotspots to 100,000 within six months. The survey found that that this growth will be concentrated in three types of location: wide-area outdoor hotzones like parks, local-area outdoor hotzones or popular tourist attractions and transport hubs like airports. The findings also showed that 58 per cent of operators, including 47 per cent of mobile operators, believed that Wi-Fi hotspots were either very important or crucial to their customers' experience, offload busy mobile broadband networks and provide a value-added services platform. The report also cited several barriers to adoption and use of public Wi-Fi hotspots. They include cumbersome authentication procedures, costs of access, user discovery of available networks and security. For instance, one UK operator recently reported that only 20 per cent of its users access the free public hotspots available to them. However, the WBA report said several challenges would be overcome by Next Generation Hotspots (NGH), which are currently undergoing trials internationally. NGH allow users to seamlessly roam between cellular and Wi-Fi networks using their mobile handset's SIM card as authentication, reducing concerns about authentication, network discovery and security. Operators are also reducing the cost of access by increasingly offering public Wi-Fi as part of broadband or cellular packages. Chris Bruce, Chair of the WBA and Chief Executive Officer, BT Openzone, said,"The findings show we are about to enter the golden age of public Wi-Fi with hotspot deployments set to soar." -- BERNAMA Malaysia