Skip to main content

Worldwide Free Wi-Fi Hotspot Venue Usage Soars

Fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, book stores and other retail establishments continue to use Wi-Fi access to attract new customers -- and keep current customers coming back.

It's been proven, the availability of free Wi-Fi broadband access does influence venue choice.

According to the latest market study by In-Stat, nearly two-thirds of their survey respondents indicated that free Wi-Fi influences their choice of venue. An additional 31 percent indicated that free access may influence their choice, and just 5 percent said that it would have no influence over venue choice.

"Our research shows that while revenue may not always be directly gleaned from the hotspot offering, free Wi-Fi has a significant value in bringing customers to a venue," says Amy Cravens, Market Analyst at In-Stat.

In some local retail business communities, pervasive access to free Wi-Fi has been used as a way to help revive a downtown or main-street marketplace -- in the hope of stimulating an small business economic recovery. Other communities are following the progress of these forward-looking retail pioneers.

Cravens adds, "It's no wonder then that over 150 thousand café or retail venues have now deployed Wi-Fi hotspots, although not all of these are free. That's in addition to the tens of thousands of travel-related broadband Internet access installations (at hotels, airports, in-flight) worldwide."

In-Stat's global market study findings include:

- Worldwide annual hotspot connects, or sessions, will reach over 2 billion by the end of 2010 with annual hotspot connects anticipated to grow to over 11 billion by 2014.

- Asia-Pacific region will have about one quarter of the worldwide hotspot venues over the forecast period.

- By 2012, handheld consumer electronics devices are anticipated to account for half of hotspot connects.

- The total worldwide hotspot market size will swell to 319,200 venues by year-end.

Popular posts from this blog

Decoding the Generative AI Global Surge

Commercial interest in Generative AI (GenAI) tools has reached a fever pitch, and the latest forecast from Gartner amplifies this emerging trend. Gartner predicts $644 billion in worldwide spending on GenAI in 2025, marking a dramatic 76.4 percent increase from the previous year. This surge underscores the impact GenAI will have across industries. It also requires a closer examination of the underlying dynamics of future potential. Generative AI Market Development This growth is fueled by the GenAI foundational model providers who invest billions into enhancing the size, performance, and reliability of their models.  Hardware also accounts for a significant portion of this spending, with ~80 percent allocated to servers, smartphones, and PCs equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities. This highlights the critical need for computational power to support the demanding workloads of GenAI. However, Gartner also injects a dose of reality into the GenAI hype cycle. There's a dec...