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Wi-Fi dead zone: China lags after an early lead
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-06-14 09:55
Has China gone cold on hot spots? Three years ago, the country's biggest
phone companies, China Netcom and China Telecom, seemed to be in a fast-paced
race to sign deals with the country's hotels, airports and fast-food chains to
open short-range wireless broadband access points, known as hot spots, in major
cities like Beijing and Shanghai and in swaths of Guangdong Province in the
south.
.
Chinese companies, in fact, began deploying so-called Wi-Fi
technology about a year before their counterparts in the United States and
Europe, and industry watchers back then predicted rapid adoption that would
mirror China's steadily rising rates of Internet and mobile phone
use.
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Today, though, you would be hard pressed to find an analyst willing
to venture a guess at how many public hot spots exist on the mainland. Publicly
advertised access points number fewer than 2,000 nationwide, although industry
executives say there may be several hundred more tucked inside neighborhood
teahouses, noodle shops and other gathering places.
.
The Asia-Pacific
region has 53 percent of the world's hot spots, according to the San Diego-based
wireless researcher ON World. But compared with many of its neighbors - South
Korea, for example, where the phone company KT expects to have 26,000 public hot
spots at the end of this year - China remains a Wi-Fi backwater.
.
There
are several reasons for this, analysts and industry executives say, not least of
which was a year-long standards dispute that pitted the Chinese government
against the predominantly foreign makers of the chips that enable computers to
receive Wi-Fi signals. That battle ended in April when Beijing backed down from
a June 1 deadline for all makers of Wi-Fi equipment, including Intel, maker of
the Centrino chipset that drives most of the world's Wi-Fi laptops, to adopt
Chinese security protocols.
.
"It definitely had a major impact," Alan
Zhen Zhou, president and chief technology officer of Top Global, one of China's
leading makers of Wi-Fi equipment, said of the standards dispute. "Things are
just now starting to come back, but for the last nine months, our customers had
put off all investment" in network equipment.
.
Intel, in fact, last week
signed agreements with municipal governments in Dalian and Chengdu to install
new broadband wireless services in the two cities.
.
China says it has now
put off the idea of a national Wi-Fi standard indefinitely. But even without
this uncertainty, analysts say there are other reasons to believe that the
technology will struggle to take hold there.
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One problem is that in
China, notebook and hand-held computers represent a small fraction of the
market. According to International Data Corp., laptops represented only about 10
percent of the 13 million personal computers shipped in China last year,
compared with a worldwide average of about 27 percent.
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So for now,
foreign business travelers represent the largest user base for Wi-Fi. The
trouble is that the marketing of the service to non-Chinese visitors has been so
poor that few seem to know how to track down the nearest hot
spot.
.
"Public Wi-Fi hot spots in China are almost invisible," said
Robert Clark, a Hong Kong-based journalist and telecommunications industry
analyst.
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The slow growth of Wi-Fi has been a boon to China's
mobile-phone operators, who also offer wireless Internet over their high-speed
networks. China Mobile Communications, the country's No.1 wireless operator,
offers Internet access for 200 yuan, or about $24, per month.
.
Some say
the convenience of accessing the Net via cellphone means that Wi-Fi will be used
more for private networks in apartment buildings and offices.
.
"I think
we will see more and more corporate use of wireless LAN," said Sandy Xie, an
analyst at Gartner in Beijing, referring to local area networks. "This is really
the future for Wi-Fi in China."
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