Today Deutsche Telekom in conjunction with iPass introduced a new service called Wi-Fi Mobilize that will help carriers address the second wave of Wi-Fi. It’s a new network service exchange for in-country and international roaming that enables carriers to meet the accelerating demand from customers for data on smartphone and tablet devices.
It’s clear now that all of the traffic engineering, spectrum licensing, femto cell-ing, and next “G” ing can’t keep up with the avalanche of data requirements unleashed by smartphones, iPad and tablets in addition to everything in the cloud revolution that has been accelerating down the track faster than anyone could have imagined three years ago.
Telecom carriers are cleverly turning to that anarchic, best effort, cheap and cheerful technology, Wi-Fi, to help them handle the demand for data. We are seeing it all over the connected world and especially here in the United States. Get an iPhone… Get religious about Wi-Fi…. Get the iPad… Get even more devout …. Get 12 Android handsets and a couple of tablets on your network and now you’re a Zealot!
Commercial Wi-Fi, free or paid, has to become a carrier offering. Why?
Because as a mobile operator:
I see hundreds of millions of devices delivered every year that don’t have, and probably never will have, anything but a Wi-Fi chipset — I want those users monetized on service from me.
I have millions of travelers who roam onto other networks and can’t handle the bill shock they have whenever they get home — shame on me — I did nothing to help them
Spectrum is expensive, build out is expensive, backhaul is expensive — if I can offload internet traffic without running it over my expensive infrastructure — that’s good news
Oh, and by the way, in many cases I already own a Wi-Fi network that is reasonably cheap to run and now I can monetize it many ways — and customers like Wi-Fi.
We are betting that Wi-Fi will be a way more integral part of tomorrow’s wireless infrastructure. We also believe that mobile operators will dominate Wi-Fi and lead in the build out, deployment and monetization of the infrastructure.
Today’s announcement is about Deutsche Telekom rolling out ‘Wi-Fi Mobilize,’ an exchange and service offering designed to help mobile operators around the world offer a global Wi-Fi service to their subscribers that can offload domestic traffic to Wi-Fi partners in their home country and pull traffic from travellers onto their own Wi-Fi networks. Deutsche Telekom can do this on the strength of their own unique assets coupled with iPass’ 518,000 hotspots around the globe and 320 Wi-Fi relationships in addition to the iPass Open Mobile technology platform that provides worldwide authentication and clearing fabric.
It is an exciting time in our industry. Cheap and cheerful is about to get very professional and we applaud Deutsche Telekom for their far reaching vision and their commitment to start the ball rolling.
We are excited about our update to the Open Device Framework. There are over 600 3G and 4G wireless cards. iPass has integrated 200 plus. Our framework helps IT administrators integrate the cards that they want for their solution easily and security. You can use the cards that you want and lower your risk in technology choices. Kevin Murray, our VP of Product Marketing explains more. And we provided a cool 15 minute tutorial that walks you through the process.
Here’s a tutorial by Kimi Ushida, Sr. Systems Engineer, that explains how to integrate your cards in six steps.
I headed off to the next seminar on the Mobile Enterprise, which seemed rather appropriate after my lunch time conversation. The seminar consisted of 3 presentations by Telefonica, VMWare and Sybase with a 5 person panel for the Q&A. This session generated some fascinating facts and figures. The one I particularly liked was that by 2015 there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet – over 10x the current population of planet earth!!!
Let’s say that again: 50 BILLION devices.
The other tidbit is that in most companies about 54% of devices are purchased personally by the employee and used for their job, as well as personal life. This presents a serious headache for the employer who wants to produce a unified mobile business strategy. In most cases they have to live with it, which means that app developers need to be flexible in their approach and take into account the fact that the Enterprise may think of it one way yet the users another.
The answer? To really consult with your users before doing anything. And guess what? Your users probably know better what is needed than the CIO.
The bigger issue for a lot of companies is security of a personal device. VMWare was touting its Android Virtualisation which can separate business and private device existences. Fragmentation of the Android market is also a big headache for the developers, however I am sure the Android community will fix that – it is early days. The consensus was that in 3 years’ time most companies will have flipped to a mobile device totally. This will only increase as the current teenage population enters the workforce. Anyone foresee themselves doing their job via Twitter and Facebook?
The last seminar of the day covered Users in the Cloud, or how do I make all these mobile devices work for me and not against me. The key items that need to be addressed according to Funamobil (means “tightrope walking”) are: Synchronisation of data across multiple devices; and security of the data and sharing the data I want to share.
The best placed companies to achieve this are the mobile operators because they are heavily regulated, according to the presenter. Then we had the idea that the cloud was not homogeneous but would need inter-cloud protocols – not sure that I was convinced by this one. The final presentation by Microsoft was mainly a numbers-fest with zero content.
But did you know there were a 1000 tweets/sec, 13 billion SMSs sent every day, 2 billion videos watched every day? Well now you do…. Currently over 830 million handsets come with GPS built in!! There will be 17.7 billion apps downloaded in 2011!
The conclusion was not that surprising: the customer will drive cloud usage and companies cannot predict or drive it. One interesting thing that seems to have been forgotten…. To make the cloud work as a true distributed system and always-accessible entity is the need for continuous connectivity, whether that be via Wi-Fi, 3G or now 4G. Without that underlying always-connected aspect, the usefulness of the cloud evaporates. Just try working on something with no connectivity when it is sitting in the cloud. I do seem to remember Thin Clients being touted by Oracle about 10+ years ago, have we now gone full circle?
I think the only difference now is that the underlying connectivity technology is at a point where it can enable the benefits of cloud access; before that was not the case. With the advent of 4G the cloud will flourish.
Started out with an early morning seminar on the new API being developed by GSMA to speed up service roll outs. Unfortunately my internal clock was not playing by the rules and I was late to the train. I ended up getting to the room 5 minutes late and the doors were closed, which has meant the place is too full to let anyone else in… quel dommage.
I went to see if I could sneak in and was greeted by the MWC security and told the seminar had been cancelled!! Odd sense of relief that I was not missing anything. She then pointed me towards one of the speakers who was more than happy to give me the one-on-one outline on the one API. Currently, the API only covers the phone wallet, SMS to email forwarding, call routing and call control. There are quite a few companies already working on providing those services.
Due to the cancellation I had more time to explore the rest of the exhibition, however I thought I would first collect some of the unique Android pins. Only a few places had any left and they were only for visitors to the stand. I made a mental note to get there early tomorrow. So, disappointed, I went off to Hall 2 via the embedded house.
This is basically the Smart House using Zigbee or Z-Wave technologies linked back via a cell phone. It covers everything including controlling the heating, power monitoring , lighting, security and health care. One of the winning entries for most innovative use of cellular technology was a medicine container that can alert someone if the medicine was not taken on time. So it could alert you as the user or your family or your doctor. Apparently 47% of all those over 50 on medication forget to take it at the right time. This leads to a multi billion dollar problem for the health insurance companies so they see this as a way of saving patients lives – or should that be money? As the cellular markets begin to saturate, operators are looking for other uses of their networks. AT&T already delivers Kindle books via their network. The others are all looking for other Machine 2 Machine (M2M) applications, and Healthcare seems to be the next killer app or should that be the “not killing app”?
Hall 2 is quite a fascinating collection of small-ish companies (generally startups) living on the backs of or for the cellular industry. It was perhaps one of the more interesting sections since the people you met on the stand generally owned the company or founded the company. Once again, you gain a sense of the human creativity all the way from smart power systems to run all the cell site equipment, to backhaul technologies that in some cases perform better than the network they serve, to management and monitoring software packages that run the networks. For some reason, Symantec was also in the section. Not sure why but they were running a version of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ with all the questions related to virus attacks. Just very odd.
Lunch called at this point and I headed over to Hall 5 for a “Congress Lunch” (I don’t recommend this at all!!!). However I did get to chat with a fascinating and entertaining CIO – yes I know that those characteristics don’t generally go together.
In this case, she ran the agricultural inspection agency for a European country. Her staff is truly nomadic; so much are they road warriors that they decided to eliminate the office and just make everyone mobile. The cloud and universal connectivity made that possible. A huge undertaking, and one that has been successfully accomplished. She trialed all the ideas for 9 months before determining the correct strategy. I also learned more about animal diseases than I really wanted to over lunch. Fortunately, I had fish, otherwise it might have been a bit of a disaster. She was fascinating to listen to. I only wish she had been a speaker at the conference, relating her real world experiences.
Next…device liability and getting the Cloud to work for you.
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