Hong Kong's largest Internet service provider (ISP) plans to double its wireless hotspot locations to about 100, two months after launching about 51 locations throughout the city.
Ringo Lau, assistant marketing manager for Pacific Century CyberWorks' Netvigator service, said the main locations the company would target were shopping malls and other retail locations.
The hotspots use 802.11b wireless hubs that transmit up to 10 megabits of shared broadband access to laptops and hand-helds in the vicinity that have receiver cards installed.
Netvigator's expansion will include opening the network up to non-Netvigator subscribers and additional services such as video streaming, because the response from the first phase of the wireless launch was encouraging.
The existing hotspots - located at Pacific Coffee shops, CyberWorks' shops and a handful of other retail locations - had been used mostly by professionals for access to e-mail during office hours, Mr Lau said.
In the early stages, access was limited to Netvigator's 340,000-plus broadband subscribers and 260,000 dial-up subscribers. Now the ISP is taking wireless registrations from people who are not home subscribers and planning to push content and applications to non-business users.
Music, video and news content from the firm's now.com.hk portal is being reformatted to fit into smaller-format personal digital assistants, and Netvigator is considering other services such as stock information and ticketing services.