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Worldwide Wi Fi Use Way Up - WOW!

All along, the long-term future of Wi Fi has depended on widespread market acceptance of the standard to drive lower production cost of equipment. That's the way that industry standards work.

It's one thing to see the client costs of Wi Fi come down, to see Wi Fi chips become embedded not only in laptops, but also in dual use cell phones, hand-held game devices, and who knows what else.

It's another thing altogether to see the next leap in advancement of the system. We've long predicted that widespread adoption of Wi Fi client devices would stimulate more widespread deployment of Wi Fi networks in the enterprise and in metropolitan area networks (MANs).

Now we see evidence of just such market penetration.

Not only is the worldwide adoption of Wi-Fi accelerating, the pace of acceptance is growing even faster than experts had anticipated. At least part of the overall growth can be attributed to rapid acceptance in international markets.

While analysts have been looking for the Wi-Fi market to expand, the rate of growth has exceeded expectations. "What surprised me the most was not just that it is growing, but the way it is growing," said Rick Bilodeau, senior director of marketing at iPass.

A global roaming service, iPass forms relationships with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world, allowing travelers to gain Internet access in far-reaching locations. Bilodeau draws his observations from iPass' most recent Wi-Fi Hotspot Index, a semiannual study that summarizes data collected from across iPass' 100,000 users. It looks at more that 80,000 hot spots in over 85 countries.

The latest index covers the first half of 2007. The index show a rapidly accelerating growth rate, with the number of sessions up 68 percent in the first half of 2007, as compared to 44 percent growth in the previous half. Worldwide Wi-Fi Use Is Growing

It's encouraging when one sees events in the real world confirming academic predictions in the lab. The thought is that the more volume of client Wi Fi chips, the lower the price and the greater the temptation of consumer device manufacturers to "wire" their devices for broadband communication with Wi Fi chips. But where will the devices be used?

First, in enterprises, and we see that with this article. Second, in larger metropolitan broadband deployments, which they allude to at the conclusion of the article.

While the iPass index does not quantify enterprise growth, Bilodeau suggested that continued expansion in that sector should soon begin to generate a visible impact in the overall Wi-Fi marketplace. "We are hitting that tipping point where enterprises are taking Wi-Fi seriously and considering it as a serious means of access, and not just an end-user gimmick," he said.

Part of the recent growth also can be explained by a rapid escalation in the international markets.

While many countries got off to a slower start than the U.S. in terms of Wi-Fi deployment, the tide is turning. In Europe for example, Wi-Fi usage almost doubled as compared to the previous half, while North American usage increased by a comparatively sluggish - though still explosive - 57 percent in the first half of 2007.

But we have a long way to go with Wi Fi. Culture lags technology, and many users have become quite attached to their cellular handsets, despite the slower data throughput available from those networks.

Still, the drop-off is steep as one moves down the list of top Wi-Fi nations. The U.S. clocks in at just over one million sessions, or single user log-in events, followed by the U.K. at 260,000 sessions. Yet the Netherlands, which ranks number five on the list of Top Ten nations, records just under 61,000 sessions.

The only Asian nation to make the Top Ten list by usage was Japan, which hardly comes as a surprise, Bilodeau said. "There is more of a culture [in Asia] around the hand held mobile data service model. When people think of wireless data they think of that first, which is why we aren't seeing as much of the traction as we are seeing in other regions," he said, adding that the ease and low cost of Wi-Fi rollouts could soon begin to drive higher adoption rates in that part of the world.

But there's more to the story - these statistics are rich! As they become used to the technology, they spend more time using it. I experienced the same thing with Wi Fi - it takes time to get used to a new way of using the Internet while away from the home or office.

The real story comes through in the length of these sessions: The typical cafe user logged in for 61 minutes, up 22 percent from the previous half; restaurant users chomped and surfed for 44 minutes, up 122 percent; train stations, averaged 27 minutes per user, up 139 percent; and office services (Kinko's et al) scored just over an hour, up two percent.

That all adds up, Bilodeau said. "The amount of time someone is going to spend in a given venue makes sense. An airport [session] is 40 minutes. So how long are you going to spend between flights? Forty minutes sounds about right."

But so far, most of this article talks about Wi Fi client devices and Hot Spots. What about Wi Fi Zones and MetroNets?

Notably absent from the iPass study are municipal and metropolitan Wi-Fi deployments. That's because there aren't enough to count, Bilodeau said. "The telling fact is that there aren't a lot of them in the world right now," he said. "The big ones we have been hoping for in Philadelphia and San Francisco and other cities just haven't come through yet."

While municipal rollouts in particular have been struggling, Bilodeau said the situation could turn around fast, because of the very nature of such deployments. Due to the large number of people living in large municipalities, "it doesn't take a lot of muni usage to get you into the top five," he said. Just a few deployments could bring in a large number of users.

This confirms what we have been saying all along. The more deployments are out there, the more opportunities there are for the masses to start using their Wi Fi devices in new ways in new places. And that takes time, and it takes MANs. We need networks to be deployed so that people will use them. This is an iterative process, where more use will stimulate more feedback, which will drive more deployments.

I hope that private and public sector community leaders start to figure out that they can capture much of the excitement of Wi Fi by deploying a Hot Zone, at much lower cost and risk than a city-wide network.

We'll see, I guess. Time will tell.

Posted on October 20, 2007 at 04:46 PM

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