Wireless Hotspots Hit 327% Growth in 2002

Despite the slowdown in the global economy, the demand for mobile connectivity "anytime, anywhere" continued to accelerate and attracted many new WLAN hotspot players, according to a new study from IDC. The European hotspot market increased by 327% over the last year from 269 locations at the end of 2001 to around 1,150 locations at the end of 2002.

Inset is Evelien Wiggers the analyst for this report who is quoted below.

In 2001 the deployment of WLAN hotspots in Western Europe slowly took off. Except for the Nordic region, where regulations were much more liberated, regulatory restrictions in other parts of Europe initially hampered a successful rollout of wireless public access services. When regulatory issues were changed in 2002, a whole new range of hotspots were announced.

"In 2003 new players will continue to enter the wireless LAN hotspot market. Not only specialized WLAN companies will start deploying public services, incumbent mobile operators and fixed operators are also expected to combine WLAN services into their existing mobile offering," said Evelien Wiggers, senior research analyst for IDC's European Telecommunications and Networking research.

Throughout 2002 the number of hotspots grew dramatically — and so did the number of operators. Most of these operators were greenfield players focusing on their own region — very few operators offered their services internationally and roaming possibilities were rare. The Western European hotspot market is becoming increasingly fragmented and is very unclear and complex for an end user. Although Telia Homerun operates 41% of all the hotspots in Europe, it was difficult to get access to its network when you were not in one of the Nordic countries. Also a Metronet subscriber had to subscribe to another network when they wanted to access their Internet outside Austria, even though Metronet rules the Austrian hotspot market.

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