New push for public WLAN services in Western Europe

Stuttgart, Germany - 6th December, 2002 - Regulatory decisions and service launches of established mobile carriers give public WLAN services in Western Europe a new push.

Recent decisions by European regulators are increasing the number of countries where commercial public WLAN services based on 802.11 standards are now possible or extendable. Additionally, mobile carriers that were in the beginning often opposed to these services, now also start launching them. Delays in the UMTS business and the option of raising interest in mobile broadband services among the lucrative business customer group made some carriers enter the field and compete with alternative providers that started their public WLAN engagement often one year in advance.

Even if alternative service providers now have to face new strong and mobile service experienced competitors, the carrier's publicity for their new WLAN services also puts light on already existing offers. Among the alternative WLAN providers that have become active during the last year, some follow interesting strategic objectives that go beyond simply installing and operating single hot-spots. With the increased competition and favourable regulatory decisions, the year 2003 will certainly be interesting for the further development of public WLAN services.

But the main question is whether the WLAN generated revenues will increase significantly. So far, PWLAN services are mainly used for brief e-mail and Internet/Intranet access by the restricted user group of business travellers. New higher revenue generating applications or applications addressing a larger customer group have still to be found.

This market outlook on the present European Public WLAN actors comes from InfoCom's strategy e-journal TS&T (Telecom Strategies and Trends). TS&T is a highly analytical telecom publication that provides in depth articles on a variety of topics covering companies, markets & trends on a bi-weekly basis.

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InfoCom is a market research and consultancy company with over 15 years experience providing strategic planning assistance to stakeholders in the telecommunications and multimedia industry. InfoCom’s independent and fact-based perspective on the telecommunications and multimedia environment contributes to decision makers understanding of market dynamics, trends and opportunities in the key markets.