The growth of Wi-Fi in recent years presents tremendous opportunities for the providers of this service. It allows them to get more traffic onto their Wi-Fi footprint and also offers a combined mobile broadband product that contributes in promoting their LTE (News - Alert) products.

iPass Inc., recently made a comment about the state of Wi-Fi in the telecom operator industry through its chief executive officer Evan Kaplan. According to Kaplan, service providers are now realizing the power of global Wi-Fi roaming and the competitive edge it provides.

While Wi-Fi is still in its infancy, 15 telecom service providers all over the globe are promoting its growth. Kaplan believes that these operators have received encouraging signs and looking forward to explosive growth in this market. Worldwide Wi-Fi roaming has the ability to generate revenue, even though the public discussion on mobile operator Wi-Fi has previously centered on cost-savings offered by domestic mobile data offload.

“The 15 service providers that have signed up to offer global Wi-Fi roaming have a combined mobile subscriber base of 974 million people worldwide,” Kaplan said. “With high-value customers demanding Wi-Fi roaming, these service providers are seizing the initiative to provide the benefits of a global Wi-Fi network. Consumers are very sensitive about expensive data roaming charges but with Wi-Fi people are used to daily, flat-rate or time based billing versus consumption usage.”

Recently, the company reported revenue of $32.2 million for Q2 2012. This was a slight decrease when compared to $33.3 million in Q1 2012 and $35.5 million in Q2 2011. The company reported a net loss of $0.9 million for Q2 2012, compared to $1.3 million for Q1 2012 and $1.1 million for Q2 2011, when announcing financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2012