Bram Jan Streefland, managing director and co-founder of Trustive, says: "The survey shows that many end users are paying excessively on a per minute basis. Around 60 per cent are opting for ad hoc methods of purchasing wireless services such as scratch cards or vouchers, which are often sold in hour-long blocks. With just over half of end users averaging a session times of 30 minutes or less, it means that about half of the time purchased is wasted and users are unnecessarily losing unused minutes. No wonder that 70 per cent of respondents believe pricing to be expensive and not offering value for money."

Streefland says: "We anticipate that subscription levels will continue to grow over the next 12-18 months. For end users the three most important things when purchasing subscription schemes are coverage, price and easy connectivity. Certainly the first and third are improving dramatically as the number of hotspots, aggregators and roaming agreements grow and client software becomes available like our HotSpotter with its easy one-click access.

It is interesting to note that for pre-paid services, end users are saying that price, validity period and minimum spend are more important than quality of service. This may mean that there is little impetus for operators to provide quality service to those customers, which is a concern. It is also interesting that 65 per cent of users would ideally like a free service, but they also want to connect easily via a fast well secured connection. Beggars can't be choosers!"

The majority - 85 per cent - of respondents control the purse strings themselves when it comes to hotspot use, rather than their place of employment. This is despite the fact that 60 per cent use wireless hotspots to access their work's intranet or the corporate network.

Keeping up-to-date when on the move and increasing productivity are seen as the two biggest benefits of hotspot access at 30 per cent and 25 per cent respectively.

Additionally, average connection speeds are increasing - 61 per cent of hotspots now have a connection speed of 2Mbp/s or greater, up from 39 per cent a year ago. While ADSL is currently the most popular form of backhaul at 57 per cent, WiMax comes in third place with 9 per cent after cable at 17 per cent.