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BT opened the public wireless LAN (PWLAN) "hot spot" at the Heathrow airport Hilton in advance of the August launch of its Openzone service, which will see companies pay STG95 a month for one employee to get unlimited Internet access within a 100-yard-radius of the PWLANs.
The telecoms company has also launched "hot spots" in its main offices in London and its development park in Suffolk.
The service from BT will be aimed initially at corporate customers, and the telecoms group is hoping to have 70 "hot spots" installed by the end of the year. To help it with this task, BT has signed up several partners such as Hilton Hotels, Earls' Court Olympia convention centre in London and Bluewater shopping centre in England. It said that hotel chain Travel Inn may also become a partner.
BT is also planning to introduce a consumer-oriented PWLAN service and said that it should have PWLANs in 4,000 cafes, roadside service areas and airports around Britain by 2005.
Along with WLAN access, Openzone will also include landline calls and mobile phone services. BT expects the offering to bring in about STG30 million in additional revenue by 2005.
PWLANs offer users high-speed Internet access by allowing them to log onto broadband connections remotely. It has also been speculated that the technology might impact on 3G take-up because it has been estimated that around 10 percent of 2.5/3G subscribers will also make use of public WLAN services by 2006, which would mean that mobile operators could lose data revenue to PWLANs.
However, analysts Yankee Group have argued that while PWLANs have a future in Europe, they will not cannibalise 3G revenues to "a significant degree."
"The differences that exist in the core value propositions offered by these two technologies should lead to the introduction of complementary, rather than competing, services," said Declan Lonergan, director of European wireless research and consulting in a statement.
"For this reason, we would encourage Europe's mobile operators to grasp the PWLAN opportunity immediately, and to leverage their formidable position of strength in mobile services and customer ownership, to secure a dominant role in the provision of PWLAN services," he added.
Lonergan predicted European PWLAN annual revenues will be USD1.8 billion by 2007 from 7.7 million active users of the technology. He said, however, that there were several challenges to PWLANs growing user numbers by this amount.
"The key technical obstacles relate to service roaming, security, and billing. Perhaps more fundamentally, however, are the challenges emanating from the uncertainty surrounding PWLAN service models, and the service provider business case," commented Lonergan.
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