Wi-Fi Hotspot Trends

An increasing number of mobile operators are opting for Wi-Fi because of increasing 3G network overloads, increasing popularity of Wi-Fi-enabled smart phones, together with the much greater speeds available and lower costs of Wi-Fi networks.

Based on various analyst reports, the data traffic for various operators had doubled during 2009 and expected more of the same in 2010. According to In-Stat report, mobile operators had become increasingly involved in the hotspot market globally as they assessed the potential of hotspots to offload wireless data traffic from overburdened 3G networks. Global hotspot usage would increase in 2009 by 47 per cent and bring total worldwide connections to 1.2 billion. Total worldwide hotspot venues have already reached approximately 245,000 locations in 2009.

Public Wi-Fi is becoming more pervasive with a 21.9 percent growth in locations in 2009. Additionally, overall Wi-Fi usage continued to grow, with an 8.2 percent increase in Q4 alone. Travelers took advantage of free Wi-Fi sponsored by Microsoft (Bing) and Google over the holidays. These campaigns contributed to an increase in usage at airports and cafés by 26 percent and 22.9 percent respectively in Q4’2009.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, more people are accessing the Internet outside their homes and offices, whether on a mobile phone, netbook, Mobile Internet devices, Tablets or even a gaming device. Over a billion new Internet enabled wireless devices are expected to ship this year alone according to Morgan Stanley, revolutionizing how people integrate media into their daily lives and changing the nature of advertising.

This ubiquity of Wi-Fi has created hotspot coverage as an expected amenity at many places of business. This along with various value add services (VAS) provided by hotspot operators coupled with the service being bundled with mobile plans, is making hotspot access much more consumer-oriented.

Analysts also predict free or nearly-free Wi-Fi will grow in other venues, such as in-flight. That service today can cost $5 to $15 for a wireless connection on a flight. Free Wi-Fi will help retain customers and give them a reason to come back, so indirectly there's a value for companies offering it. Advertising will be another way free Wi-Fi is financed, experts predicted. With an ad-based model, customers would agree to accept a certain number of ads in return for so many free minutes. Several models for financing free wireless access will emerge, and Wi-Fi will be increasingly offered for free.

This increased momentum in Wi-Fi hotspots has opened up tremendous oppurtunies for innovative service offerings to the end customers.

Stay tuned for these business oppurtunies in the next blog.

Are Wireless Networks Secure?

Organisations are eager to migrate to wireless LANs (WLANs). Users are clamouring for WLAN access because it allows them to access their network and the Internet from anywhere in the workplace, without having to "plug in". Administrators are attracted to WLANs because they're easier to install (no cable to pull through walls and ceilings), they're flexible (they can be installed in places that wired LANs cannot, and do not require rewiring when seating or office plans change), and, in part owing to this flexibility, they're less expensive to maintain over the long-term. But the chief concern in migrating to WLAN access is security.

No computer network is completely secure. It's always theoretically possible for eavesdroppers to "snoop" the traffic on any network and it's possible to add unwanted traffic as well. So the question here is really, is it secure enough?

Many hotspot owners implement security features like 128-bit WEP and WPA that can scramble or "encrypt" network traffic so that its contents can't easily deciphered by snoopers. Likewise, wireless routers and access points (APs) incorporate acess control features such as MAC address filtering that deny network requests from unwanted clients. In some countries federal regulations have been imposed on wireless networks in public locations. This makes it necessary for WiFi hotspot owners to implement security measures for their networks as well as log information regarding their subscribers and usage. As it turned out, first-generation implementations of WEP did not provide this level of security. In fact, numerous published reports was easily cracked, seriously breaching the privacy of any wireless data transmission.

802.1X is a next-generation draft of IEEE WLAN specifications and protocols written to address the security and management pitfalls of 802.11b. The 802.1X protocol provides sub protocols and methods for better protecting authentication and data transmission.Organisations which have deferred migrating to WLANs because of security concerns can now safely take advantage of the benefits of WLAN technology by implementing 802.1X WLANs which implement advanced security techniques and which are managed by a RADIUS server.

More on 802.1X in our next post!

Did you know...

450 Million Wi-Fi Users Worldwide

• 68% of users would rather give up chocolate than do without Wi-Fi*
• Users ranked Wi-Fi above YouTube®, MySpace®, Facebook® and iTunes® as technology having the biggest impact on their online experience*
• 56% of users will seek Wi-Fi in their next cell phone purchase*
• 1 in 3 look for it in music players, digital cameras, and gaming devices*
• 1 in 4 would switch cellular carriers to get Wi-Fi data or voice plans on a converged phone**

( * Wi-Fi Alliance/Kelton Research 2007; ** ABI Research)

This was an old survey. Today Wi-Fi user count has crossed 700 million users worldwide. WiFi services is in demand like never before. Go Ahead and make your business premise WiFi enabled. Contact WiFi Sales on sales@wifi-soft.com

Technorati Tags: WiFi facts,News

Increase Revenue Using Prepaid Cards for Your Hotspot

Prepaid cards are an easy way to generate revenue from your hotspot. Prepaid cards are called with different names such as coupons, vouchers, codes, ticket etc. It can be primarily used at a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Our WiFiLAN Prepaid solution can print unlimited coupons for with different restriction on user’s time and bandwidth usage. You can customize your coupon with your own logo and background. These generated coupons can be printed on Avery A4 size paper.

How it helps in generating revenue?

1. You can sell these coupons over the counter

2. You can provide these coupons as a complementary with your core product or service, thus increasing your sales by providing value added service

You can customize different prepaid plans to cater to the different customer’s.

What are you waiting for? Contact WiFi-Soft sales team today.

Technorati Tags: Hotspots,Prepaid solution,WiFiLAN,increase revenue

Advertisement module added

Are you looking to generate extra revenue from our WiFi hotspots?

Wifi-soft has recently added a new module to its WiFiLAN product suite. This module allows WiFi operators to run advertisement campaigns on their hotspots and generate extra advertisement revenue. The operator can choose to either upload its own local advertisements or use Wifi-soft's advertisement partner for sourcing advertisements. WiFiLAN provides a platform to manage the ads and publish them on the portal pages.

WiFiLAN will provide a complete advertisement solution to upload, manage, track and publish advertisements on the login or welcome pages. The advertisement can be uploaded in image (jpeg or gif) or video (flash) format. Administrators can group certain number of ads together and display them at specific locations. They can also specify weight to each advertisement that is used to decide the priority of each ad.

WiFiLAN will automatically generate HTML tags for each advertisement campaign. The tags can be customized for a particular hotspot thus allowing administrators to run location-specific ad campaigns.

WiFiLAN tracks ad statistics such as CPI, CPC, CTR and generates reports for each location or each campaign.

For more information, please contact Wifi-soft support (support@wifi-soft.com)

Enjoy!

Wifi-soft launches new website

Wifi-soft has launched a new version of its website. The new website offers a lot of information about our products and services along with online video and presentations. Customers who are interested in learning more about our hosted and dedicated solutions, can fill out an online form and request access to our demo account.

We have also started a 24-hour call center (help desk) service for our customers. Customers interested can contact us to learn more about the service and pricing. We have also started offering captive portal design and development services to customers who don't have resources to do them in-house.

Lastly, we will soon launch an e-shop to sell compatible access controllers, access points and other wireless hardware through our channel partners and resellers.

We hope you all find our new website helpful and informative.

Thank you.

Welcome to Wifi-soft Blog.

We plan to provide useful information to our customer, partners and reseller via this blog. Please keep checking for updates and information here.

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