Hot spots on the rise

Apart from your upstair neighbor’s unsecured network, the general public’s access to hot spots is blooming all over the planet.

Is this a case for new domain suffixes? Is this kind of growth sufficient to show up on the ICANN’s radar screen? Perhaps it’s too soon for new suffixes but nevertheless, the Wi-Fi boom is real.

In fact, the number of worldwide Wi-Fi hot spots has passed the 100k mark, according to the latest numbers emanating from JiWire. The firm specializes in hot spot tracking.

Taking a look at the “Top 10″ page is pretty instructive.

Countrywise, the US tops the list with a whopping 37k hot spots, followed by the UK, South Korea, Germany and Japan in the top tier. In the lower tier, France, Italy, the Netherlans, Taiwan and Canada at 1.4k hotspots close the Top 10.

As far as cities are concerned, the Seoul metropolitan area is first with over 2k hot spots, followed closely by Tokyo and London while Paris, San Francisco, Daegu, New York, Singapore, Busan and Hong Kong at 605 hot spots end the Top 10 cities listing.

Interesting data also comes from the location type Top 10 where it’s obvious to see hotels and resorts, at over 26k hot spots are the prime internet connectivity destination. Next comes restaurants at 20k, followed respectively by cafes, stores & shopping malls, pubs, “others”, office buildings, gaz stations, airports and libraries at just over 1k hot spots.

These numbers are updated daily so it’s nice to see where the growth is coming from.

The overwhelming majority of these hot spots, over 92k of them, require a fee while just over 8k are free. JiWire defines a hot spot as a physical address where people can connect to a public wireless network. Again, your own unsecured 802.11g wireless router won’t count!

To know more about Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi Alliance has some excellent documentation.

Are these growing numbers a justification for .wifi or .hotspot domain name suffixes that should be presented to the ICANN? I’d love to see something in the tune of http://soho.newyork.wifi/ if such a thing were possible.