Senior Analyst Ariel Dajes, author of Analysys Research’s new report Viable Business Models Point to Big Opportunities for Public WLAN, believes that there is still substantial growth potential in this area. “Although the market will be relatively small in absolute terms compared with mobile cellular services, we think that it still presents a significant opportunity for players interested in making money from business and residential customers when they are out of the home or the office.”
Although the business traveller still continues to drive this immature market, the report suggests that it is imperative that PWLAN service providers expand to new customer segments. “We expect that, by 2009, there will be at least as many residential customers as business ones”, continued Dajes. “In the USA, teenagers are already used to having private WLANs at home and they expect to have the same facilities in restaurants and cafés. The European market has yet to experience this move.
Expansion into the consumer market must be enabled by the development of devices and key applications, such as voice, and the ubiquity of network availability, and charging strategies are also expected to mature, moving away from prepaid scratchcards to technology-agnostic bundles of PWLAN services offered with broadband connections or mobile data services, or postpaid subscription packages. “We expect to see broadband operators following the approach taken by Korea Telecom in South Korea, Deutsche Telekom in Germany and TeliaSonera in Finland, bundling PWLAN with broadband or cellular data services to offer much more competitively priced services,” said Dajes.
Viable Business Models Point to Big Opportunities for Public WLAN analyses the factors that must be taken into account in order for service providers to take advantage of the opportunities of the PWLAN market. As well as providing case studies of the successful players in this market, including BT, iPass, T-Mobile and Wayport, it uses the lessons learnt from these players to develop the most viable business models for success. Indepth qualitative analysis is backed up by detailed market forecasts for France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Western Europe as a whole to 2009.
About Analysys (www.analysys.com)
Analysys provides strategy and management consultancy, information services and start-up support throughout the telecommunications, IT and media sector. Its grasp of market dynamics, coupled with creativity, rigour and renowned objectivity, enables Analysys to consistently exceed the high levels of quality and innovation that its clients expect. The company has over 130 staff in offices in Cambridge, London, Glasgow, Madrid, Milan, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and works with associates in Auckland, Melbourne and Vancouver.
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