Research conducted by the Wi-Fi Alliance and Wakefield Research in September 2009 showed that inflight Internet was fast becoming a valued airline service among business travelers. The survey stated that:
76 percent would choose an airline based on the availability of inflight Wi-Fi;
55 percent would shift their flight by one day if it meant having inflight Wi-Fi;
In a survey that we did to our customers on inflight Wi-Fi, one customer said, “There are always things that can be done if connected during a flight.”
I think that anyone would agree that having Wi-Fi available on your flight can help your productivity, and that of your mobile employees – you can have real-time project collaboration, respond immediately to client requests, keep up and even get ahead on email and much more. So, we are excited that our iPass Mobile Network now has inflight Wi-Fi available through Gogo Inflight Internet. You only need to use your iPassConnect client, and the connection, policies and billing are handled the same as any other hotspot.
To get you up-to-speed quickly, we put together an information page. You find out which airlines are equipped with Gogo, how the iPass service works, results and insights from our new customer survey on inflight Wi-Fi usage, and how you, as an existing iPass customer, can access our new inflight Wi-Fi service.
Interesting article in WSJ today re: mobile carrier’s approach to dealing with bandwidth constraints.
In summary, although many solutions are available to address parts of the problem, much incremental investment is still required and all of that will take a few years at least, to be completed. The inevitable outcome is likely to be more usage-based plans.
More in my next post as to why that may not be a terrible thing for enterprises and their IT managers. . .
Some of my iPass colleagues will be discussing some of the key trends around mobility and how they are impacting the enterprise and the IT/Telecom manager’s jobs. I will focus my attention on key trends in the telecom carrier space and try to look ahead and synthesize some of the implications for the enterprise mobility.
From my perspective the most relevant trend in the mobility world is the increased availability and growing adoption of devices that have the ability to use the mobile internet – PCs with mobile data cards and smartphones/superphones. These devices support much more than e-mail and they are driving increased data traffic on mobile networks at a dizzying pace – Morgan Stanley estimates that mobile data traffic on wireless networks will grow at a 131% compound annual growth rate between 2008 and 2013. In summary, the combination of devices, mobile data networks and applications is already combining to strain the capability of many of these networks to handle the traffic loads in some markets or at certain times of the day and the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Nothing new here, we’ve all heard about this impact on the mobile networks. So why should I care about this? Well, the answer is that, beyond the obvious short-term performance implications and potential productivity impacts to mobile professionals, there is also another potential implication for how enterprises procure these services.
Let me explain a bit further. . .
It’s not that there aren’t technological solutions to address this issue and ameliorate the situation over time. The reality is that there are a growing set of options that mobile network operators are pursuing, with several strategies and investment programs to address the issue. The real issue is where the bottleneck presents itself.
Mobile networks are a combination of radio networks and landline networks. The radio networks use the spectrum (that a mobile carrier owns rights to) as a medium to transmit data from PCs with mobile data cards and smartphones/superphones to radio towers. Morgan Stanley estimates that there are ~250,000 of these cell site towers in the US. These cell site towers that house the radio equipment are then connected to the internet over a combination of technologies that today includes multiple T1s , microwave and, in some cases, via fiber.
This is where the bottleneck lies. Most carriers have enough bandwidth and spectrum in most locations on their radio network to handle this increase in traffic between the devices and the cell towers. However, few of the ~250,000 cell sites in the US can say the same about the landline network that connects them to the internet. Industry analysts estimate that mobile carriers are going to be playing catch-up on this front through 2012-2013.
See how this bottleneck can impact the Enterprise, in Part 2, tomorrow.
As I discussed yesterday, the mobile carriers’ have a new bottleneck at the landline network, rather than the radio network.
The fact that most carriers are going to be playing catch up over the next few years is likely to, among other things, make them rethink the way they sell mobile internet services. We are already hearing many rumblings from providers that that very few users are driving the vast majority of the traffic growth which also implies that most users are paying for way more than they consume, in order to keep the carriers profitable.
One impact to the enterprise is that over time, the price plans form these carriers – which today are at least predictable, if still relatively expensive – are likely to become less predictable over time, as carriers roll out usage-based plans as a means to control and/or pay for their capital expenditures. Carriers may opt for per charging fees per Mbits of traffic or for structuring plans that include a certain number of Mbits/month with overages for usage above these thresholds (common today in the EU but not in the US).
The other impact to the enterprise is that they will likely need to know more than they know today regarding their user’s behaviors in order to position themselves better in future negotiations with carriers or in order to stem the tide of growing telecom expenditures being approved via the expense report process. If the enterprise wants to get ahead of this trend, it will become more important to be able to answer questions such as:
where do my users use the service
what applications are they using
how many mbits per month are consumed
Being able to answer these questions is likely to put IT/Telecom managers in a better position to negotiate with carriers and/or devise effective strategies to control and better predict and/or budget for these costs.
