Cafenet News

WiFi roaming strategy could cut business costs

23 February 2004

Business trips are costing companies in hidden ways, Gartner says, and high on the list of opaque charges is the expense of using wireless services.

According to The Register, Gartner recommends that companies should establish accounts with WiFi service providers in key airports, hotels and other hotspots in order to increase productivity.

Such accounts could generate an extra half hour a day of work product from roaming executives, it says.

Typically, travellers encounter new WiFi providers at every step in a trip and are often held hostage to extremely expensive proprietary WiFi connections in business class hotels.

Signing up for these services eats into time that could be spent on productive work -- and everyone who uses them on an ad hoc basis pays full retail.

Last year, Gartner says, there were "only" 9.4 million hotspot users but there will be at least three times that many -- nearly 30 million -- this year.

Gartner says that establishing accounts could provide some relief from retail costing and would allow companies to better manage the actual costs of wireless usage.

It also says that making WiFi ineligible for expense accounting is not an effective alternative since executives see access as essential and are likely to recoup their costs in other ways on expense vouchers.

"Build a strategy for use of hotspots by employees, but beware of entering into subscription contracts with service providers that cannot supply roaming agreements to meet the enterprise's needs," Ian Keene, research vice president at Gartner, told The Register. "Organisations should avoid long-term contracts because this service sector is changing."

Gartner suggests that the hodge-podge of providers that greets every voyaging executive will thin down this year as vendors consolidate.