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Hyderabad:
Wi-Fi hotspots have doom sealed. Not
so long ago, telecom operators were happily advertising their open access Wireless
Fidelity (Wi-Fi) hotspots in public places. Today, they''ve ceased further rollouts
of the technology. All because of WiMax. According
to industry sources, setting up of Wi-Fi hotspots across cities has been discontinued,
both by Tata Indicom and BSNL. The preliminary reason for the death of Wi-Fi,
apart from the WiMax invasion, is poor economics of operating Wi-Fi at public
places. A senior industry official says that Wi-Fi would be viable for campus
networks for about seven or eight years, before its curtains for the technology. There
are an estimated 6,000 odd commercial Wi-Fi hotspots spread across seven major
Indian cities. Bangalore has the maximum number. BSNL
has around 350 spots across 24 cities, while Tata Indicom has around 50 in Andhra
Pradesh alone. Earlier
this year a study by Bangalore-based telecom research firm Tonse Telecom, had
projected the overall Indian Wi-Fi market (which covers WLAN hardware, systems
integration and software services, but leaves out embedded devices and laptops)
to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of around 61.4 per cent, from the current
$41.57 million to over $744 million by 2012. This
seems unlikely, in the event of the WiMax sectrum being released as expected,
with the Department of Telecom expected to release new bandwidth in about a month.
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