Public wireless local area network (WLAN) hotspots – where mobile and PC users can connect to networks ‘wirelessly’ – will largely be a failure, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
WLAN systems allow mobile users to connect to local networks – such as an employee’s company network – without requiring a physical plug-in point. Areas where these connections are possible have been dubbed ‘hot-spots’. In the UK, BT already has around 66 of these hot-spots, with a further 15 provided by Swisscom.
Forrester forecasts that there will only be 53 million WLAN devices in Europe by 2008, serving just 7.7 million users.
“We believe that much of the money being poured into public WLAN today to enable access – from places as diverse as bars, marinas, hotels, and airports – is being wasted. Simply, basic constraints on the number of devices in use and users’ willingness to pay a significant amount for internet access on the go will limit public WLAN users to numbers well short of planned networks’ carrying capacity,” warns senior analyst Lars Godell.
Forrester says that laptops are the killer device for WLAN, but only 10% of Europeans currently own a laptop and this is expected to rise to just 16% by 2008.
