| A recent Wi-Fi Alliance-Tonse Telecom report predicts that the market will more than treble in size over the next 3-4 years "" from around $263 million (Rs 1,050 crore) during 2008-09 to reach $891 million (Rs 3,560 crore) by 2011-12. |
| This figure excludes revenues from chipsets in laptops, cellphone handsets and other devices. |
| Accounting for these exclusions and the fact that 90-95 per cent of notebooks (which are outstripping desktop growth rates) shipped have built-in Wi-Fi, the numbers are bound to increase over the coming years. |
| The report also estimates public access Wi-Fi hotspots "" inclusive of locations in hotels, service apartments, shopping malls "" to be in the range of about 1,500-1,600. Wi-Fi hotspots, the report suggests, are beginning to become a part of lead Internet service provider (ISP) marketing plans. |
| For instance, VSNL "" a Tata Group company "" has already rolled out over 350 public hotspot locations, and is looking to increase the chain to about 1,000 this year in 2008. |
| Tata Indicom Wi-Fi hotspot locations include major domestic and international airports, leading premium hotels, railway stations, educational institutions, sports stadiums, hospitals, restaurant, coffee shop chains and retail stores. |
| Key locations include Taj Hotels Group, Le Meridian, Cafe Coffee Day and Barista coffee shops, Manipal University, and Wockhardt. |
| BSNL, too, has major plans for the setting up 100,000 Community Service Centres (CSCs) which will be carrying a powerful info kiosk that has Internet connectivity, but they may or may not have Wi-Fi connectivity separately, notes the report. |
| The Indian Railways too recently announced that important rail-routes between metros would be made Wi-Fi-enabled together with 50 railway stations (20 of which to be completed by March 2008). |
| Some large Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) deployment plans have been announced recently which will further trigger Wi-Fi connectivity as the technologies work nicely complementing each other, the report indicates. |
| Public access in hotels and service apartments and 3- and 4-star hotel rooms too are beginning to widely support Wi-Fi access. The service is mostly on a fee basis, and free access to Wi-Fi for hotel guests. Some hotel chains also sell Wi-Fi cards/dongles in the reception. Others sell pre-paid or free scratch cards from the reception to use the service. |
| Real-estate developers also are seeing value in wireless technologies. In mid-February 2008, DLF Limited, India's largest real estate developer (source: AC Nielsen Report), announced they would implement Wi-Fi across DLF buildings all over India and is the first real estate company to adopt this technology. |
| The Wi-Fi services would be provided by O-Zone networks Pvt Ltd. The Ansals, too, have signed up with O-Zone for Wi-Fi services delivery in all their shopping properties over a multi-year contract. |
| In the rural belts, we have projects like Ashwini (from Byrraju Foundation) which provides people in rural Andhra Pradesh timely access to an array of high quality services using a virtual delivery platform. |
| The connectivity needed for the projects is provided by 802.11 b/g systems. These have been deployed with help from IIT-Kanpur and Media Lab Asia. Wi-Fi plays a key enabling role for Ashwini, because of its wide affordability and interoperability. |
| Meanwhile, several Indian states and cities have announced city- and state-wide wireless projects with Wi-Fi local networks and WiMAX backhaul (leading to the data centres), with private partners. |
| One such project is being planned by the Municipality of Pimpri-Chinchwad region in Western India, following the example of Pune, which has started deployment of its Wi-Fi project with Intel as a project partner. |
| Full deployment is expected to be within one year. The project is defined for five years, extendable for two more years. |
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