Notes from the WBA: Wi-Fi helping increase in data, traffic
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, EditorMore on the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) Roundtable Conference from last week. Last week, I reported on the keynote by Chris Bruce, the Chair of WBA and CEO of BTOpenZone.
The keynote was delivered by Vijay Perumbeti, Executive Director of Strategic Standards, AT&T member of the Executive Committee of GSMA. He spoke about Mobile Broadband and Wi-Fi underscoring Chris’ comments with further data: that 5.2 billion connections were made last year and 6 Billion will happen by the end of 2011.
Shipments of smartphones will surpass PCs in 2012 and already there were over 107 Million smartphones delivered in Q2 2011. Also, third world countries now depend on wireless as the dominant access to the internet. He also mentioned that even with the planned LTE networks and the $130B that is being invested annually by operators, Wi-Fi will always be there as part of the solution.
However, today there are impediments to Wi-Fi offload, and technology alone is not enough. These include: offloading happening ad-hoc and limiting uptake; there are multiple stakeholders in the value change; implementation issues and various business models; inconsistent use of strong authentication and security mechanisms; and lack of standardized models for handling commercial agreements. Thus, the coordination among mobile and Wi-Fi operators needs to happen to increase uptake.
Vijay went on to talk about the joint effort of the GSMA and WBA to bring together the Wi-Fi and 3GPP ecosystem to make Wi-Fi roaming as easy and transparent as 3GPP roaming, leveraging the GSMA experience. As the partnership begins, they plan to address authentication, security, roaming, billing and network access selection. The future will bring greater integration of the two ecosystems, address handoffs/IP address preservation, support for QoS in Wi-Fi networks, service contracts for non-internet type services and policy support in Wi-Fi networks. He believes that the collaboration holds great promise for customers, operators and suppliers.
The most interesting speech came next from the Wireless CTO of Cisco, Bob Friday; the new World of Mobile Connectivity. He spoke of the “collision of two continents” – that of mobile voice (cellular) and Internet (Wi-Fi) and how because of iconic devices created by Steve Jobs we are here today. He then discussed the pace of innovation acceleration; telephone, radio, electricity, PC, Internet, auto and the fact that the Internet is on par to set another record in the innovation cycle. But it is happening faster than expected, causing problems. There is 3G offload urgency in operators and BYOD in the enterprise.
We are now entering the zettabyte scale (1B terabytes or 1021) and before 2015 we will be entering yottabytes (1024) (data in a holographic snapshot of the earth’s surface).
We are seeing 32% CAGR in 2010-2015. The global IP traffic drivers are more devices (15B connections), more internet users (3B internet users), faster broadband speed (4-fold speed increases) and more rich media content. Examples of global device growth in 2010-2015 include 5.8B network devices in APAC alone and heterogenous consumer broadband devices such as mobile devices, laptops, internet-enabled HDTV and gaming consoles. In terms of speeds, we will see 4-6 fold increases in APAC and overall growth from 7 to 28 Mbps. Faster networks enable more experiences; a movie download at 5 Mbps is 41 minutes, at 10 Mbps is 20 mins and at 100 Mbps is 2 mins.
By 2015 fixed Wi-Fi traffic will surpass fixed wired traffic and the majority of traffic carried by Wi-Fi mirrors the evening hours versus cellular which goes down. He then spoke of the barrier to convergence being Wi-Fi authentication today but which will evolve from the untrusted Wi-Fi network to the trusted Wi-Fi network and that we are getting close now with Next Generation Hotspots. He predicts market adoption of NGH will happen in 2012, aligning the WBA, GSMA and WFA. After authentication will come the convergence of policy, roaming agreements and online signup.
Finally, imagine a world of the mobile internet where connectivity enables equality, enables carbon reduction and enables education everywhere.
We then moved from a global mobile internet to the All Blacks in the World Cup with Steve Simms from Tomizone presenting the Auckland Wi-Fi initiative that was profitable from Day One and was the world’s first Wi-Fi deployment that blended a metro Wi-Fi network with a transport Wi-Fi network to create a single seamless Wi-Fi network. He also spoke about Location Based Services and presented Sydney airport as a successful implementation of free access with an initiative for LBS that resulted in increased retail “dwell time” and a new revenue stream for the airport. LBS as an emerging “elephant in the room” that needs to paid attention to.
For more info: WBA Global Developments Report (with survey/trend data)
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