T-Mobile Reports Increasing Wi-Fi Use

For the first time, mobile and Wi-Fi provider T-Mobile USA released user numbers for the "Hotspot" side of its business, saying it had 450,000 paying customers use the service over the past three months. The company did not give any comparison statistics for last year, although it did say customers are using the service for longer periods of time compared with previous years.

Users were staying logged in for an average of 64 minutes this year, an increase of 19 minutes over 2004 and 41 minutes over 2003. 3 million logins have been recorded so far this year. The T-Mobile Hotspot service is available in airports and hotels, as well as in Starbucks, Borders and Kinko's retail locations. According to the company, the service has about 5,700 US hotspots, and 6,500 across Europe.