[Rooftops] Boston Globe: Hotspots, Cold Feet

[Jim Youll]

'Hotspots,' cold feet
Some analysts wonder whether WiFi craze is a bubble waiting to burst
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 6/30/2003

For a battered telecommunications industry aching for something to 
get excited about, the high-speed wireless Internet access service 
known as WiFi may be generating more growth projections and venture 
capitalist exuberance than anything else on the landscape.

But some analysts and investors are now questioning whether one key 
market for WiFi, public Net access through "hotspots" at airports, 
hotels, and coffee shops, is rapidly becoming a dotcom-style bubble 
waiting to burst, with service providers throwing far more money at 
expanding services than consumer demand will warrant any time soon.

Some 4,500 WiFi hotspots -- areas of up to 300 feet in radius within 
which subscribers with laptop and handheld computers can get 
broadband-speed Net service -- have been deployed across the United 
States, mainly in the last two years, according to Pyramid Research 
of Cambridge. Pyramid predicts that figure could jump to 80,000 
within four years. Industry giants AT&T, IBM, and Intel have launched 
a company called Cometa Networks to build up to 15,000 WiFi hotspots 
by next year, as new deals get announced virtually every week for 
service expansions and funding for start-up WiFi equipment makers.
...
In what has been widely read as a warning about the viability of 
WiFi, the nation's biggest phone company, Verizon Communications, has 
deployed the first 200 of a planned 1,000 hotspots in New York using 
public pay phone connections. But Verizon is offering WiFi only as a 
bonus to attract customers for its home digital subscriber line 
broadband service, not seeing it as a sustainable business in its own 
right.

FULL STORY:
http://boston.com/business/tech_innovation/news/2003/06/30/hotspots.htm