WiMax eats up the market for commercial Wi-Fi

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.

For the future, Wi-Fi would see application only with small bandwidth resellers or the smaller internet service providers (ISPs). Corporate connectivity has shown a preference for wireless data cards that work on GSM or CDMA, rather than hotspots.

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.