By Spencer Kelly Click presenter

Canary Wharf in London is the centre of Europe's largest wireless network, which is no doubt very handy for the 75,000 city-slickers working in or wandering between the skyscrapers.

Wi-fi companies could see an opportunity to invest in rural areas

But there are plenty of people who are not lucky enough to live or work bang in the middle of a huge hotspot.

Now there are proposals being put forward by the UK communications regulator, Ofcom to boost the signal strength of the antennas beaming out the signal in the first place, which means each hotspot could cover a larger area.

That means they could deliver broadband access to parts of the UK which currently have no high-speed internet.

City-dwellers could also benefit if the signal strength was turned up, because it might mean that wi-fi providers could contemplate setting up city-wide wi-fi, so-called mesh networks, for the first time in Europe.

There are already several wi-fi mesh networks under development in the US. Each mesh is a network of hotspots across an area, allowing users to wander the streets hopping from one hotspot to another while staying connected to the same network.

Rural connections

The plan to boost the coverage of wireless internet in the UK is potentially good news for wi-fi operators because at the moment it is simply not commercially viable to deploy antennas outside of urban areas.

"We are getting interest or semi-interest from rural areas today so we have to roll out technology to those types of areas," said Bobby Sarin, the chief operating officer of wi-fi operators, The Cloud.

"Today the economics don't pan out, obviously because of the low signal strength. If Ofcom do introduce this it provides us a business plan and economics to actually go out there and deploy mesh networks in rural areas."

Wimax has been billed as the successor to wi-fi. Its technology has been designed to give people high speed access to the net over relatively long distances.

But Mr Sarin doubts the market is ready for wimax.

"The one thing we really need to be careful about is that there are more deployable devices out there with wi-fi chip sets in them than wimax chip sets.