Is Free Muni WiFi An Expecation From Residents?

A recent survey conducted by Devicescape, The Cloud and Trustive reveals that 84 percent of respondents want citywide WI-Fi and 91 percent expect Wi-Fi when they are traveling (i.e. when they are in airports, bus terminals, train stations and ferries).

Two other interesting figures from the survey: 56% are willing to pay for citywide Wi-Fi access as a utility like water, gas or electricity, although 79 percent believe that Wi-Fi should be free. Here are more interesting results from the survey and my analysis.

(1) Device most often used to connect to Wi-Fi when traveling:

35% iPhone
30% Laptop
20% Nokia phone
6% Windows Mobile for smartphones and other devices
3% Netbook (e.g. Asus EEEPC)
4% Other
1% Blackberry


(2) Where people use their 3G/Wi-Fi device:

66% Home
59% Hotel
56% Bar / restaurant / cafe
54% Airport
53% Work
37% Outdoors
29% Train station
16% While Driving
6% Petrol station

(3) What irritates you most when trying to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot:

50% Complicated login screens
35% Complex payment procedures
37% Difficulty identifying which hotspots I can use
33% Poor quality of service
11% Poor tech support
24% All of the above

Esme Vos of www.muniwireless.com commented:

"It’s not surprising that the respondents hate complicated login screens more than anything else. Look at where they use Wi-Fi: it’s when they’re traveling (see #2 above). So imagine you are waiting in an airport or a train station. You click to join a Wi-Fi network and the first thing you see is a login screen that requires you to spend more time trying to log in than the time it would take you to check email or find an address on a map. This is what people get in many train stations in Europe, not to mention airports everywhere except where the airport has free Wi-Fi.

More than one-third cited the difficulty of finding hotspots to use. This happens when you are confronted with several Wi-Fi networks and you’re trying to figure out which one is the best connection (actually there is a company called WeFi that makes a software client you can download that finds the best Wi-Fi network for you — disclosure: I am on the advisory board of WeFi)"

Other results:

(4) The overwhelming majority of smartphone users (81%) prefer using Wi-Fi over 3G for browsing Web sites, downloading data, Google searches and sending e-mail.

(5) The most widely used application is email (84%), followed by Internet browsing activities such as reading news websites, blogs, using social networking sites (78%). The rest use Chat/IM/Skype (32%) but very few play online games (4%) or watch streaming video (14%).

(6) 86% of respondents want device manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola to build Wi-Fi into their handsets and 82% of respondents want the mobile service provider to provide an overall 3G/Wi-Fi data package. 90% want their mobile service provider to allow them to roam between Wi-Fi and 3G networks.

(7) Skype which was chosen by 85% of the respondents as their preferred VOIP service, followed by Truphone (11%), Jahjah (2%), EQO (1%), and Defi (1%).

Who were the people surveyed?

38% come from the US, 28% from the UK and Europe (except Russia), Asia Pacific (7%), Japan (7%), Russia (4%) with the rest coming from Mexico, Canada, India, the Middle East, China, etc. The vast majority, over 90%, were male.

Age group:
3% 17 and under
15% 18 - 25
24% 26 - 34
32% 35 - 45
26% Above 45

What do they do? 14% are students, 21% own businesses or are consultants, contractors and freelancers. 10% report that their job requires them to travel frequently. 21% are engineers, programmers and other technical workers.


Clearly the demand is there...the question becomes: Is the local leadership (at the Muni level) there to gain the funding where required and build the community support?

Steve Amarante
www.sky-packets.com
Better Living Through WiFi