Bitbuzz's Alex French, operations director; Russell McQuillan, business development director; and Shane Deasy, managing director. Photo by Chris Bellew, Fennell Photography
Wi-Fi network operator Bitbuzz has reported an 11pc year-on-year increase in revenue to €1,102,153 for the first half of 2014, driven by demand for Wi-Fi in hotel rooms.
The Irish company also saw a 49pc year-on-year increase in its number of registered users, from 1,514,540 to 2,978,490 by the end of June.
That same month, Bitbuzz conducted a survey that suggests 70pc of hotel guests are not turning on the TV in their room, instead choosing to stream content through their tablet or laptop.
This trend has seen Bitbuzz selling higher bandwidth back-end services to hotels throughout the UK and Ireland to cope with the increased demands for streaming video content.
“In Ireland, we are continuing to see the knock-on effect of increased appetite for Wi-Fi amongst consumers with a marked increase in business with Costa Coffee, Spar and Applegreen and Insomnia,” said Shane Deasy, managing director of Bitbuzz.
“We attribute the continued growth of daily logins to the simplified login process we introduced early this year, which has proved extremely popular with users, as the number of smartphones and tablet computers in the country continues to grow.”
The total number of logins per month for Bitbuzz, which now exceeds 1,519,660, almost treble the 550,000 average monthly logins recorded in 2013.
Bitbuzz is now seeing an average of more than 50,000 logins every day.
The total number of Bitbuzz Wi-Fi hotspots across Ireland at the end of June 2014 amounted to 522, representing a year-on-year increase of 12pc.
