On the last Saturday of May this year, Rameshkumar Visvanath was with his family at Hyderabad's Shoppers' Stop, when he received an urgent message relating to a Fortune 100 client. The 42-year-old Vice President (Finance) at Satyam Computer Services headed for the Wi-Fi-enabled Barista outlet on the ground floor of the store and sent out an e-mail from his Imate Jasjar 3g smartphone giving that crucial final nod from his department. "These Wi-Fi hot spots are really a boon as they allow me to remain connected all the time and help maintain work-life balance," he says, adding that he spends at least an hour every week at a hot spot and much more when travelling (which is at least seven to eight days every month).

It's a phenomenon that's taking root across the country. And as many more people take to computing on the go, hotel, restaurant and retail chains are increasingly offering both paid and free Wi-Fi access as a value-added service to clients. Says Naresh Malhotra, CEO, Café Coffee Day: "We noticed many customers taking coffee breaks with their laptops and handhelds and felt wireless internet access would be a useful value-add to their experience." The chain is rolling out Wi-Fi infrastructure at all its outlets, and the process of wiring all its stores across 50 cities is expected to be completed soon. Adds Rajeev Agarwal, CEO, Innoviti, a Bangalore-based telecom solutions vendor: "It's nice to get out of the office and do some work in the comfort of a restaurant over a steaming cup of coffee." The McDonald's restaurant in Mumbai's Phoenix Mills also recently became a Wi-Fi hot spot. Says Mitesh Kadam, Assistant Manager, McDonald's: "On average, we get two users per day."

"These Wi-Fi hot spots allow me to remain connected all the time and help maintain work-life balance" Rameshkumar Visvanath/ VP (Finance)/ Satyam Computer Services	"Wi-Fi frees you from the constraints of browsing the web from your desktop or an internet cafe" Hari Sukumar Freelance model

Hotel Krishna Palace Residency, on Mumbai's Grant Road, has three wireless zones-its 2,500 sq. ft reception area and at The Flute and Sudama, its two restaurants. "Our bookings have risen almost 5 per cent since we started offering this service," says Saurabh Shetty, a Director of the hotel. Adds Karan Sachdeva, a guest at the hotel: "Without question, this is an excellent concept as it helps me to keep working from wherever I am." The main draw, obviously, is that Wi-Fi makes work location-neutral. "The best part is that my 'mobile office' allows me to mix pleasure and pressure," says Satyam's Visvanath. He should know, considering that his day typically begins at 6.30 a.m. and concludes (unless he decides not to switch off) at around 11 p.m.

Several of these chains offer Wi-Fi access free, though some others do levy charges that range from the nominal to the very expensive. Café Coffee Day, for instance, charges Rs 30 for half-an-hour; Chennai's Hotel Trident, on the other hand, charges Rs 340 for a two-hour package. Some Trident guests reportedly walk across to the neighbouring Hotel Radisson GRT, which offers this service free, to surf the internet. "We don't mind as we feel these people could well become our customers in future," says Vikram Cotah, General Manager of the hotel. The Oberoi Group, which runs Hotel Trident, did not respond to an e-mailed questionnaire. Other hotels, though, don't like publicising this service as "we don't want to become internet hubs; we only want to offer the service to our guests", according to B.V.S. Reddy, President of the Chennai-based Hotel Savera.

A majority of users say they use Wi-Fi only for work. Neha Sharma, a sales engineer at it consulting firm utStarcom India, sometimes uses the Wi-Fi-enabled zones at Delhi's India Habitat Centre (IHC) to access the internet on her laptop. "In today's environment, you have to be mobile; so working out of a hot spot is often a necessity," she says, adding: "I only use it for work and most of my colleagues also use Wi-Fi for work-related purposes only." Wi-Fi also played an important role in MBA placements. "We had a great placement season this year and having wireless internet helped us organise infrastructure better for recruiters and the media," says Madhurjaya Banerjee, an iim Bangalore student and a member of the institute's student media cell.

But there is, nonetheless, a sizeable section of people who visit Wi-Fi hot spots to chat with friends, download music or send CVs to potential recruiters. "It's fun to sit outside the office and play some music or just chat with friends on the internet. Sometimes, I also update my music collection from one of these places," says Abhisehek Dhingra, a business analyst at Wipro.

Another attraction of Wi-Fi hot spots is the facility they offer of making international long distance calls using Skype. It's absolutely free. Admits Sharma: "I've used it once or twice to make calls using VOIP."

It's also a huge enabler in education. The IIMs and the IITs, of course, are all Wi-Fi enabled and have been for a while. Now, even relatively lesser known institutes, such as the Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research (WIMDR), Mumbai, are jumping onto the bandwagon. "Since students are floating around outside of regular class timings, Wi-Fi enables them to receive messages from professors and coordinators instantly and also access teaching material put up online," says Pradeep Pendse, Senior Associate Dean (Systems & E-Business) at the institute. Adds Chetan Sabharwal, a second-year student at WIMDR: "We have Yahoo groups for the entire class and all the students can get mails at the same time. This is very convenient and keeps us all connected."

Most users, however, have a major grouse. Says utStarcom's Sharma: "Wi-Fi is not always reliable and readily available in India. So, many people I know move around with internet access cards." Kanwar Digvijay Singh, a software engineer at Tulip it Services, a software consultancy firm and a regular at IHC, concurs. "It's so much easier to surf at a Wi-Fi hot spot in the developed world. Here, you just don't have the kind of speeds that you have there," he says, adding: "The Wi-Fi culture will really take off in India only when there are greater numbers of hot spots and much higher speeds." Security of data is another issue. But these are still relatively early days for Wi-Fi in India. Just as the dial-up modem has been replaced by universal broadband access, Wi-Fi will, almost certainly, gain in popularity in the months to come.

-Reporting by Rahul Sachitanand, E. Kumar Sharma, Ahona Ghosh, Nitya Varadarajan & Aman Malik