Light Reading’s Strategic Opportunities in Service Provider Wi-Fi
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Last week, Light Reading had an event called Strategic Opportunities in Service Provider Wi-Fi at the Landmark Hotel in London.
The event was well attended by many of the major UK Service Providers including several of iPass’ network partners such as BT, The Cloud (owned by BSKYB), Everything Everywhere, eircom and Boingo. Other significant attendees included FON, O2, Talk Talk and Virgin Media. The events sponsors were Cisco (Super Platinum), Ericsson, Ruckus and AnyFi (Gold).
Key themes of the conference were:
- Lessons learned
- Different approaches by Service Providers in offering Wi-Fi
- Different drivers for investing in Wi-Fi – customer retention, customer acquisition, revenue, 3G offload
- Industry initiatives – WBA NGH pjt
Key points from the presentations:
Tags: carriers, wi-fi access
- Cisco: Lessons learned from Service Providers – efficiencies in installing APs in macro environments, drivers (growth in mobile data, lack of spectrum, attractiveness of economics in offload)
- BT: Wi-Fi is seen a strategic asset, included in its broadband customers’ service; content is the future; consumption largely indoors and part of a heterogeneous solution and an integrated data network; Wi-Fi is important because of the capacity crunch, customer experience, cost effectiveness and extended coverage
- Wireless 20/20 (consultancy looking at the economics of Wi-Fi vs LTE): interesting model for London revealing that 40% of London covered is the optimum amount for cost saving vs. rolling out an LTE network, 6-7% saving or $80-100M
- O2: noted iPhone was the game changer; entered the industry to get the experience it wanted to deliver as an alternative to working through wholesale partners; provides completely open and free access to ALL users; providing value to the venue and quality of service are extremely important
- eircom: re-investing in Wi-Fi following initial investment and recognizes there is a ways to go still; customer acquisition and retention are drivers as well as revenue but this is moving the needle much less; for non-eircom subscribers it offers 10 minutes free, then you can purchase access for the rest of the day for €1
- FON: see Wi-Fi as complimentary to 3G/4G and a best efforts service, but this must change. ~15% of user base are active albeit the percentage varies from country to country, where it sells devices – then virtually 100% of users are active
