Wi-Fi hot spots make Web more accessible on PCs and it's moving to cellphones

MONTREAL - Wi-Fi "hot spots" help make the Web more accessible for laptop users and this wireless technology is moving to smartphones and other consumer devices.

There are thousands of these so-called hot spots in North America and Europe, often in airport lounges, fast-food restaurants, coffee shops, malls and hotels. It's either free or there's a user fee.

"Wi-Fi helps make the Internet more accessible to people," said Stan Schatt of New York-based ABI Research, which tracks emerging technologies.

"Once you get to the Internet, then you can go look at your e-mail, you can go to websites, you can pretty much do anything."

Virtually every laptop sold in North American is going to be Wi-Fi capable, said Schatt, vice-president and research director of wireless connectivity at ABI.

"Certainly on the consumer side, there's terrific growth because people have reached the point where they are familiar with Wi-Fi. They have it on their laptops and connect when they are travelling," he said.

While it's far more common on PCs than cellphones, Wi-Fi is starting to be a feature on some high-end smartphones such as the BlackBerry Bold, to be available this month.

"Voice-over Wi-Fi is still a cutting edge technology," Schatt said, but added that the growth of Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones is going to be steady.

A Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone can increase productivity, he said, and if consumers are able to use free hot spots they can end up lowering their monthly charges.

It will also be available on a new product called a mobile Internet device - larger than a smartphone but smaller than a laptop - that's coming to the market in the next two years.

"People in the future will have more and more devices that are Wi-Fi enabled," Schatt said.

The Internet wireless directory, Hotspot Locations, says there are more than 33,000 wireless local area networks hot spots worldwide. That includes 11,713 in North America, of which 824 are in Canada.

Some municipalities in Canada offer free or paid Wi-Fi service.

"One of the earliest municipalities to embrace it and develop it was Fredericton in New Brunswick," said Lawrence Surtees, vice-president of communications research at IDC Canada Ltd. in Toronto.

Fredericton's free municipal Wi-Fi service, Fred-eZone, was launched five years ago.

Maurice Gallant, the City of Fredericton's chief information officer, said Wi-Fi is helping to bridge the digital divide, and local businesses and university actively promote the service.

"If you come to Fredericton, it looks like any town except that you see people all over the place with their equipment and they're happily connecting for free," said Gallant. "It's not a big deal here. It's just normal."

The New York-based think tank Intelligent Community Forum named Fredericton as one of the top seven "intelligent" communities in the world along with such places as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Dundee, Scotland and winner Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea.

U.S. consultant James Carlini said municipal Wi-Fi has seen some failures.

"It was sold as 'We will put it in and it will be free. You don't have to make any investment,"' said Carlini, of Carlini and Associates Inc., an international management consulting firm in the Chicago area.

"Like everything else, it has its applications," Carlini said. "But if you put together some Wi-Fi hot spots at the corner coffee shop that doesn't mean you can do the network for a whole metropolitan area. Wi-Fi was never designed to cover a big urban area."

He said a major urban area would need a combination of fibre optics and WiMax, which would deliver wireless broadband connectivity to PCs over a longer distance.

Schatt said where Wi-Fi is widely deployed, it's reasonably secure.

He also said that Wi-Fi technology is available on cameras and allows pictures to be sent over the Internet and is also on MP3 players.

It's being used as part of municipal video surveillance systems and in hospitals, factories and mines as a means of communication, Schatt added.

The idea for Wi-Fi began in 1999 at a trade show in the United States attended by global players in the industry, Schatt said.

There's some controversy on the Internet whether Wi-Fi stands for wireless fidelity or anything at all.