Shipments of Wireless LAN adapters are growing enormously, but we're already at 10 million total (about 2.5 million of which ship with PCs), and Champness thinks that 10M understates by excluding handhelds and a number of other embedded devices.
"The MAC will be placed on the motherboard" Intel plans, but the radio will be in an add-on card or other piece, fueling growth. Even with growing market, already have 10M at least looking for places to connect.
Analysts seem to agree: Wi-Fi will grow at about 30% CAGR through 2006. "We firmly believe that. We believe there's potential for it to do better than that."
36M business travelers in US; 27M carry laptops. Talked about survey from last year that they conducted for market research: most business travelers they spoke to want high- speed service and will pay for it.
Ubiquity. 3,000 intentional hot spots; 1M potential locations. 212 conf centers, 3,032 train stations, 5,352 airports, 53,500 hotels, 72K business centers, 202K gas stations, 480K restaurants, cafes, and bars; 1.1M retail stores.
Sky Dayton's perspective on industry evolution:
When Earthlink started, industry chaotic. No one knew who their competitors were.
(Editor's notes: Some of these slides are modified but essentially from their original press briefing a year ago -- the model hasn't changed for them, and their message is the same.)
ISP segmentation: physical (wires: Sprint, AT&T), network (IP backhauls like UUNet), and brands (end users: like AOL, Earthlink, MSN). In early days, companies tried to do the whole thing, like Netcom.
Each company ultimately focused primary energy on particular layer. Competition within layers; cooperation across layers.
Hot Spot Industry segmentation: venues (locations or real estate owners like hotels, bookstores, etc.); HSO (networks: Wayport, NetNearU, T-Mobile, etc.). HSOs contract with venues to build hot spots.
Aggregator layer on top of that. Take fragmented layers and aggregate them into a single service. Boingo, GRIC, iPass. Boingo only one focused on wireless, largest aggregated network.
Aggregators offers to end users as the brand: Boingo, T-Mobile, Earthlink, Sprint, AT&T.
"property owners who are working with hot spot operators who specialize in installing and running hot spot networks" then partner with aggregators which offer service to brands.
Lot of opportunity for smaller companies to get in. Room for one or two major aggregators. Both brand and HSOs want to work with companies that have economy of scale.
No HSO will control more than 10 percent of underlying footprint. Short range, low barrier to entry, venue fragmentation.
