AMSTERDAM-In Europe, Bluetooth technology will outpace wireless local area network hot spots by 2008, according to a new report from Forrester Research.
“We believe that much of the money being poured into public WLAN today to enable access-from places as diverse as bars, marinas, hotels and airports, as well as trains, buses, and metro stations-is being wasted,” said Lars Godell, senior analyst. “Simply, basic constraints on the number of devices in use and users’ willingness to pay a significant amount for Internet access on the go will limit public WLAN users to numbers well short of planned networks’ carrying capacity.”
Forrester forecasts that there will be 286 million Bluetooth-enabled phones, laptops, and personal digital assistants in Europe in 2008 compared with 53 million WLAN devices, most of which will be laptop computers. Analysts further expect WLAN hot spots to serve just 7.7 million European consumers in 2008, even with 312 million European mobile-phone users that year.
Forrester’s expectations are based on the belief that WLAN hot spots cater best to laptops, which only 10 percent of Europeans currently own, and only 16 percent are predicted to own them in 2008.
“Realistically, WLAN will only creep into 2 percent of phones as part of a dual-mode chip solution in high-end hybrid devices like the Nokia Communicator and Sony Ericsson P800,” explained Godell. “WLAN will increasingly show up in laptops, reaching 22 percent this year and 80 percent in 2008, as corporate deployments renew demand once security bugs have been fixed. While 66 percent of laptops will have Bluetooth in 2008, 65 percent will be dual mode. Finally, six out of 10 PDAs get Bluetooth-twice as many as get WLAN.”
