| Excellent article Wi-Fi Internet Access Is Hot, But Its Profit Potential Is Tepid : One tidbit. With prices of Wi-Fi chips and networking equipment plummeting even as unit sales are soaring, the industry's revenues are not expected to top $3 billion - 1 percent of the worldwide market for telecommunications equipment - before 2006, according to Synergy Research. I've been trying to understand hotspot pricing by looking at it from first principles. Iit's quite hard given the different bsuiness models and usage patterns. Even for hotspots aimed at causal users, there's quite a lot of tension there between loss leader services provided for free to attract more custom and paid for roaming services with a large billing and provision infrastructure. Meanwhile the only people making money are selling spades not mining for gold; the hardware manufacturers not the service providers. But as mentioned above, they are in a market with high competition and a rapidly falling price curve. And the product we ought to buy (triple standard 802.11b, a and g) isn't even available yet. More on this later. [from: JB Wifi] |
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[ 09-Dec-02 9:46am ]
