Wi-Fi is catching on faster than experts expected, according to officials at iPass, the global broadband roaming service. The latest semi-annual report from the company’s Wi-Fi Hotspot Index, shows the number of Wi-Fi sessions for its hot-spot partners was up 68 percent in the first half of this year and that doesn’t even count use on muni networks.Wi-Fi is catching on faster than experts expected, according to officials at iPass, the global broadband roaming service. The latest semi-annual report from the company’s Wi-Fi Hotspot Index shows the number of Wi-Fi sessions up 68 percent in the first half of this year and that doesn’t even count use on muni networks.
This impressive growth rate tops that from the iPass Index for the last half of 2006 when the number of sessions grew 44 percent growth. iPass attributes the growth to the fast pace of adoption in European markets and the increased acceptance of Wi-Fi in the enterprise.
A report on Wi-Fi Planet quotes an iPass executive on why muni deployments were not counted in the survey, saying “there aren’t enough to count.”
Well, we’d beg to differ. iPass shrugs off this oversight with the excuse that big deployments in the major cities “just haven’t come through” but there are a lot of cities outside Philadelphia, San Francisco and Chicago–more than 400, in fact, that have hundreds to thousands of users accessing the Internet through their muni networks.
Rick Bilodeau, senior director of marketing at iPass does acknowledge that “the situation could change fast.” But even without the muni deployments being counted, there’s fascinating data in this report for anyone mapping the trends, including breakdowns on iPass’s usage findings in Europe and Asia.
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