Wi-Fi comes to Canary Wharf

The Canary Wharf area of London's Docklands is now Wi-Fi-enabled after an agreement between the estate's owner, wireless wholesaler The Cloud and other partners including O2.

Tony Partington, Canary Wharf Group MD, yesterday said: "Wi-Fi's time has come. This is a huge market for service providers to tap."

The 35-hectare site, home to major offices for banks including Barclays, Citigroup and HSBC, houses 70,000 workers, a figure which is likely to increase by almost 50 per cent as buildings are filled or constructed over the next few years. It already represents Europe's largest Wi-Fi business district.

Canary Wharf struck a deal for The Cloud to network public areas, including those that serve people using public transport. The Cloud then sells to service providers such as BT Openzone and O2, who often charge fixed monthly fees per end user.

Canary Wharf's Partington added: "We see this as an upgrade to our telecoms infrastructure. It will sit alongside more 3G."

That's a view backed up by mobile operator O2, which has invested billions in 3G but recognises in many situations static users will prefer the high-bandwidth Wi-Fi allows.

George Polk, CEO of The Cloud, said his company is seeing growth of between 10 and 20 per cent in hotspot usage across Europe - per week. There is an ongoing discussion as to how much traffic is for voice over IP (VoIP) calls - The Cloud has a partnership with VoIP darling Skype - or what the split is between business users and consumers.

Polk said: "We can't know what's going to be the most interesting use of this network."