iPass announced a new milestone in public Wi-Fi, with over 50 million hotspots available worldwide, up by 80 percent since 2013.
As an enhancement to its Wi-Fi Growth Map, a real-time assessment of global Wi-Fi, iPass also unveiled the Wi-Fi Leaderboard, a scorecard that ranks countries based on the number of hotspots they have overall, as well where they stand with Wi-Fi availability in categories like in-flight and hotels.
The leaderboard shows that France with over 13 million hotspots holds the top spot, followed by the US with 9.8 million and the UK at 5.6 million.
France gained the top spot thanks to ISPs opening customer routers to shared public access. With US ISPs now rolling out similar services, the US is expected to surpass France by the end of this year with more than 32 million hotspots.
Overall, iPass predicts the number of hotspots will hit 340 million worldwide by 2018.
Maravedis Rethink conducted the research and analysis behind the creation of the iPass Growth Map.
The same research provides the basis for the iPass Wi-Fi leaderboard.
Source:Telecompaper