The Elephant in the Room
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
The cellular bandwidth crunch may indeed be one of the top concerns that keep carrier CEOs up at night. With mobile data traffic growing exponentially* and forecasted to reach 6.3EB** by 2015, carriers are faced with a real prospect of mobile data delivery costs outweighing revenues as early as in 2012.
Recently, AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega told CNN that one of the big reasons for its purchase of T-Mobile “was the need for additional spectrum” and that, without T-Mobile, ATT would run into big challenges in the short term, especially in major cities.
So considering this dire bandwidth crunch problem, I ask why not use Wi-Fi to offload traffic from congested 3G/4G networks? Wi-Fi seems to be the “elephant in the room” that until recently many of the carriers failed to notice. Back in 2002 soon after I started working at Cisco on wireless mobility solutions, the key focus was on “mission critical” applications for verticals such as public safety, transportation, and “enterprise grade” applications such as on-campus roaming and guest access.
A couple of years later, some of the more visionary projects at Cisco were targeting to “blanket” major cities with Wi-Fi for mass market uses, but the applications and the commercial models were not mature enough at the time to trigger mass deployments. This was back in the day when BlackBerry and Palm Treo were the only game in town and before the era of YouTube and Netflix.
Back to the future, today with Wi-Fi being used by over 700 million people, with over 750,000 publically accessible hotspots around the world, and with mobile video traffic projected to exceed 25% of the total internet traffic by the end of 2011, Wi-Fi is without doubt becoming both ubiquitous and ripe for mass deployment.
With these compelling numbers in mind, the question is how come that until recently carriers failed to realize the opportunity of using Wi-Fi to offload data from their congested cellular networks? I personally believe that the reason, at least in part, has to do with the difficulty to predict a few years back the positive feedback loop which created the exponential growth in mobile data traffic that we witness today. The positive feedback loop started with video over the internet emerging as the “killer app” and was compounded by increases in 3G/4G data throughput and smartphone performance. This in turn enhanced the mobile video user experience, which increased the demand for mobile video and other bandwidth intensive applications even further, and so forth…
There is no doubt though that now the carriers do recognize both the bandwidth crunch related challenges and the Wi-Fi potential to help address these challenges, at least in the near term. This is why I’m so excited that yesterday the International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS), the international wholesale arm of Deutsche Telekom Group within the IBU, and iPass Inc. announced their partnership to create WiFi Mobilize, a new network services exchange which will offer both data offload and international roaming solutions.
WiFi Mobilize solutions are crafted to address the bandwidth crunch as well as bill shock and inconsistent access, usually associated with international roaming. WiFi Mobilize offers its Wi-Fi exchange services to carriers worldwide who can now quickly realize their data offload and international roaming plans by becoming WiFi Mobilize members. As part of this membership, carriers will be granted access to:
- Open Mobile Platform used to provide authentication, settlement, reporting and other capabilities to enhance the end users’ experience and deliver value added services on top of their own WiFi and cellular transport infrastructure.
- Open Mobile Client used to provide a consistent user experience and enforce network access policies across devices and networks.
- International roaming service leveraging the growing iPass Mobile Network with more than 500,000 commercial-grade WiFi hotspots.
For more details please refer to yesterday’s announcement and the blog by Evan Kaplan, CEO of iPass, yesterday called: With a little help – Cheap and Cheerful Wi-Fi wins the day.
* 92% CAGR between 2010 and 2015: based on Cisco VNI Mobile 2011 report
** Based on Cisco VNI mobile 2011 report; 1 EB = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1018 bytes = 1 billion gigabytes = 1 million terabytes
Tags: 3G network, carriers, enterprise mobility, roaming, wi-fi access
