Improved customer experience a big push for Carrier Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi has been around for a long time, as have hotspots. Slowly carriers are relying on this cost-effective technology and bringing it into their networks as a way of providing a similar experience customers have got so used to with home Wi-Fi. As usual the bottleneck is in the so called ‘last mile’.
Another key take away from the survey is the apparent shift in attitude towards Wi-Fi. According to the WBA:
The largest figure ever seen in this annual survey – 56.7% – said they were more confident about investing in public Wi-Fi (whether as operators or in offering products and carrier services), than they had been a year ago. In the 2013 study, the figure was just under 52%, and that, in turn, was up from 43% in 2012.
Next year should see a significant increase in Wi-Fi in public areas and venues. With bargain hunters turning towards smartphones to hunt down good deals, malls and shopping areas are key environments that would benefit from Carrier-grade Wi-Fi. Stadiums and airports are also good candidates. Many airports in particular could benefit from more robust Wi-Fi to improve services.
“Carrier Wi-Fi has experienced a revolution over the past year and is now being embraced by an ever growing number of carriers. The significant progress in live commercial NGH deployments, and in turn new monetization strategies, provide evidence of major improvements in quality of service, ease of use and revenue generation that the technology brings,” said Shrikant Shenwai, CEO of the WBA. “This research underlines the growing momentum behind Wi-Fi that is increasing year-on-year, driven by the ecosystem coming together to develop the technology and promote its wide ranging benefits.”
The more mature trend of Wi-Fi roaming was also found to be instrumental in extending coverage, both at a local and international level. According to the report:
In the 2013 survey, 30% of the hotspot operators also had roaming deals to supplement their networks, while in 2014, that percentage has risen to just over half. Among those surveyed, there was a total base of over 2.8 million directly owned and managed hotspots, and an average of 42,000 in a deployment. But when roaming was included, the carriers could provide a total of 8.85 million locations between them, or an average of 193,000 each.
The survey also found that NGH deployments were rising. Making Wi-Fi invisible to the end-user in the network as well as providing security are two of the most important benefits of the NGH. There have been a lot of column inches written on the vulnerability of Wi-Fi networks both at the home and in public and security is a large and growing issue for wireless networks. Of course investments in NGH need to be funded and finding ways to monetize these investments is important, whether it is about attracting customers to a venue or finding novel ways to get customers to pay for the service. Here many operators fall back on an old favorite — roaming. Here is what the survey revealed:
Last year, 44% of respondents expected to have deployed by the end of 2015. By the end of 2016, a further 31% of those with active plans for NGH expect to have deployed. That would indicate uptake of 84% by that stage among those players which are already making their plans to deploy. This revelation comes at a time when significant advances have been made in NGH deployments which now include 12 live commercial deployments worldwide.
Now NGH is a commercial reality, monetization is rising to the top of the agenda and the most dramatic change from last year is that 35% of respondents are implementing Wi-Fi roaming as one of their monetization strategies – charging for roaming access, or providing tools and platforms to enable this. That is up sharply from just 10% in 2013.
The survey carried out during Q3 2014, had a total of 210 respondents: 45% of those being operators. Other significant respondent groups were Wi-Fi equipment and device vendors, with 25% and consultants/integrators, on 19%. The majority of the responses came from North America (39%) and Europe (26%), followed by Asia-Pacific (19%).
www.wballiance.com/resource-center/wba-industry-report
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