A new study commissioned by the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) shows that the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots will grow more than fourfold from 1.3 million to reach 5.8 million hotspots by 2015. This will be fueled primarily by the growth of consumer tablets and smartphones, which is placing an increasing strain on mobile data networks. 

Telecom operators are leveraging hotspots to offload wireless data traffic off congested mobile data networks, and are deploying large number of hotspots accordingly. For example, China Mobile alone plans to deploy a million hotspots and Japan's KDDI plans to increase its 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots by another 90,000 hotspots within six months.

On a global basis, laptops account for 48 percent of all connections at Wi-Fi hotspots, followed by smartphones (36 percent) and tablets (10 percent). What is particularly interesting, though, is how smartphones already outnumber laptop connections at Wi-Fi hotspots in North America and the Asia Pacific. 

While the survey doesn't include statistics on the actual data transferred, connection count is important as many Wi-Fi access points (APs) have upper limits on the number of devices that they can simultaneously connect. The report also noted that hotspots have to become easier to use. To that end, trials of next generation hotspot technology that use SIM cards for authentication are currently ongoing.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at MSNBC

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