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Amsterdam (pte034/20.06.2003/17:30) - Forrester market researchers have joined the ranks of WLAN skeptics and warned of an upcoming crash in the WLAN business. According to Forrester, there will not be enough willing users to keep up with the booming number of public hotspots.
Senior Forrester analyst Lars Godell has observed that the current hype about WLAN makes it seem as if the dot.com crash never happened, and he believes much of the money being poured into WLAN hotspots is wasted http://www.forrester.com/ER/Press/Releases/0,4661,,00.html .
Forrestor predicts that only 7.7 million people will regularly use public hotspots by 2008. At the same time, WLAN providers will be faced with the high costs of connecting hotspots. The Forrester prognosis is based on the statistic that only ten per cent of Europeans currently own a notebook and would profit most from WLAN access. This number is only expected to increase to 16 per cent. High prices, a lack of roaming agreements and IT security issues may also further slow the introduction of public WLAN.
Finally, large mobile operators are expected to present a hurdle, as WLAN-equipped mobile phones could endanger voice-over-IP, their main source of income. They will therefore attempt to influence mobile phone manufacturers to make sure WLAN does not spread too quickly. This would limit the use of WLAN to company and home networks.
Of the 286 million bluetooth devices, including phones, PDAs or notebooks, that Forrester predicts will be in use by 2008, only 53 million are expected to be WLAN-equipped.
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