Demand for Wi-Fi hots up

With renewed growth drivers coming from diverse avenues such as real estate, expansion of retail business, mushrooming new mega-townships in tier-2 and tier-3 towns, up-market large campus schools and universities and rural areas, India is on the verge of a sustained demand for wireless networking.

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.