Many cellular carriers have started the hotspot offerings in
limited capacities a while ago, but recently, few carriers are
pursuing this initiative aggressively. Aircel is one of them. You
must have watched the aggressive campaigns of Aircel WiFi
offerings, and might have thought why cellular carriers have
suddenly started building the base of WiFi hotspots apart from
cellular infrastructure? The article is an attempt to explore
in depth, the same question, and provide useful insights into the
growing world of WiFi hotspots
WiFi has shown tremendous growth in recent years, both in terms of
technology advancements and rate of adoption by industries and
people around the world. Among the available local wireless network
technologies, the latest WiFi technology, 802.11n, provides the
most reliable, predictable and high speed wireless access
accompanied with large enough range for local wireless networks.
Realizing the benefits of WiFi, the same is now being
commercialized on a large scale. Almost every consumer device
including the smartphones, tablets, printers, scanners, projectors,
etc. now has embedded WiFi capability by default. Enterprises and
organizations are deploying WiFi to support their day-to-day
business operations including the critical ones too. More and
more people are installing WiFi at their homes for convenience.
Moreover, apart from people and offices deploying WiFi at their
premises, WiFi is also being installed at a variety of public
places, such as restaurants, coffee shops, airports, hotels,
railway stations, etc. Any such WiFi location targeting public
users for convenient Internet access on the move is popularly
termed as Hotspot. WiFi hotspots were initially setup in order to
attract/benefit people at the location of the Hotspot by providing
paid/free wireless internet access to their mobile devices.
However, with explosive growth of smart mobile devices users in
recent years and people’s increased dependence on bandwidth
consuming applications such as gaming, audio/video streaming and
social networking etc., cellular carriers have started realizing
lately the business potential of hotspots in serving the mobility
needs of a user. Subsequently, certain carriers started setting up
chain of hotspots across geographies to complement their existing
cellular infrastructure. In addition to this, few carriers also
started offering mobile WiFi hotspots services enabling a customer
to share a single cellular connection with multiple
users/devices.