How Many Wifis could a Wifier Wifi if a Wifier could Wifi Wifi?
I’m trying to get a ballpark estimate of how many wifi-ers there are in the US and worldwide. I’d be happy just to know how many wifi cards have been sold. But in researching this (i.e., looking it up on Google), I came across a seeming discrepancy in numbers. According to an article by Adam Baer called “The Wif-Fi Boom“:
William Clark, research director at Gartner, said that the number of frequent Wi-Fi users was expected to grow to 1.9 million next year from 700,000 in 2002, with the number of public hotspots in North America likely to nearly triple by the end of next year from about 3,300 now.
But an article by journalist and friend Glenn Fleishman, called “So Many Nodes, So Little Security,” says that a recent study show found “14,000 business and personal networks ” in NYC alone.
What’s amusing is that these two articles appeared in the same issue of the “Circuits” section of The New York Times.
My money’s definitely on Glenn. If you have any other figures for the number of wifi-ers, please let me know; I’m doing a segment on wifi for the radio show “Here and Now” and I’d like to be right within an order of magnitude.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Gartner is talking about public, commercial, for profit hotspots and probably arrived at the 3,300 number by talking to T-Mobile, Wayport et al. It’s highly likely that they don’t include places like Portland, Bryant park or the other free mom’n’pop cafes that give away bandwidth because they can. There’s a whole lot happening below the radar here.
As for total numbers of 802.11a/b/g devices shipped, who knows. Certainly in the millions worldwide. Possibly even 10s of millions.
How many Wi’s would a WiFi Fi if a WiFi could Fi Wi.
What is interesting is that with wifi the ratio of users to hotspots is incredibly low relative to wired networks. I don’t know what the implications are, but I am sure there are some interesting ones.
I brought my laptop with me on my New York trip so I could try out the public wireless. The one at Bryant Park was great, except that I almost froze my fingers off. Probably why I was the only one there….
If you want to get a secure wifi use wep at 128 and a vpn inside that.
wep can be cracked