The WLAN technology is widely used in private environments, at home or within the corporation, for connecting to the Internet or to the Intranet of the enterprise. The success of this technology is such that today most new laptops are equipped with a WLAN chipset.

 

Often perceived as a technology for “private environment”, WLAN is also a real opportunity for service providers. Whether in a remote access service, an extension to a fix line service or bundled with the wireless data service of mobile network operator, public WLAN is a service differentiator. Public WLAN nicely complements dial-up, ethernet, 3G or Wimax access without competing against them.

 

Market demand for public WLAN roaming, i.e. the ability for the subscriber of service provider to use the network of another service provider, is in constant growth. Similar to the development of the mobile phone services, subscribers are now expecting to be able to use WLAN to connect to the Internet at their business destinations .

Roaming benefits both the operators of hotspots and service providers. For service providers it means access to additional public WLAN hotspots and therefore additional revenue from their subscribers. For hotspot operators, it increases the usage on their network and therefore additional revenues.