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Wireless 'hot spot' goes live in Britain
Monday, July 01 2002
by Andrew McLindon


BT has launched its first public wireless "hot spot" as a report says that the
technology will not impact telcos as dramatically as previously thought.



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.