There has been a considerable rise in the number of Wi-fi hotspots during the last four years. The wi-fi had its inception in the UK by the year 2002 when there were just a few commercial, public hotspots around. Check the Ofcom report which says the total number of public hotspots has crossed 12000 mark by 2006, up by 32 % over the previous year. Nearly one-fifths of the

UK adults own a Wi-Fi enabled laptop and two-thirds of them use the hotspot for accessing internet.

It is estimated that more than 30 percent of UK adults have mobiles that can access internet, however, less than half of them (48 %) access internet from their mobiles. The high cost factor is cited as one of the main reasons by a considerable part of the mobile users for not going online regularly. The other reason was that many of them were skeptic or little interested in using their mobiles for internet access.Wifi is a wirless broadband technology primarily established to cater the needs of LAN users, i.e. its coverage is usually limited to small area. Being a potential alternative for ADSL and cable broadband, it uses IEEE 802.11 standard for accessing internet. Now, every

UK adult who has Wi-fi enabled devices like laptops can access internet at access points known as Wifi hotspots. In UK, three types of Wi-fi hotspots are prevalent - Private hotspots, public hotspots like cafes or restaurants where the users are usually not charged for wifi access and commercial hotspots where the users are provided with wifi-enabled devices for a charge.The history of Wi-fi in the

Uk dates back to year 2002 when the hotspots were born with a small number wifi hotspots which were launched here and there. However the spurious growth of hotspots led total number of commercial hotspots to 12,000 by the end of 2006. While there are many operators who provide Wi-fi access, the cloud remains the largest Wi-fi broadband provider in the

UK. Cloud operates 7400 hotspots which is estimated to be more than two-thirds of total Wi-fi hotspots in the

UK. BT Openszone and T-mobile run 1800 and 1080 hotspots in the

UK respectively, and usually the Wi-fi users are allowed to access more hotspots out of their circles within the rules of companies' roaming agreement.