Why commercial-grade Wi-Fi matters
Thursday, May 12th, 2011 Brian Metzger, Sr. Marketing Mgr, Carrier Services
On April 26th, iPass announced that our global Wi-Fi footprint exceeded 500,000 venues. An important point about this number is that it is all ‘commercial-grade’ access. What does that mean? Well, in simple terms, it means trust and quality – that there is a respectable level of credibility, uptime and performance associated with the access point. Commercial-grade doesn’t mean ‘expensive’. In fact, over 21,000 of our commercial-grade access points are FREE!
Why such a big focus on commercial-grade? Well, in an effort to preserve data roaming spend, would you want to inadvertently connect your enterprise and employees to ‘Jackals’ hotspot? Or, what about a hotspot belonging to an obscure ‘numbered company’? Who owns these hotspots anyway? Are they involved in a credit card theft ring? Identify theft? Are they criminals or can they be trusted? How would you know? Hence the importance of the iPass commercial-grade footprint, provisioned by trusted network suppliers.
There are other nascent hotspot aggregators that offer a larger number of access points by allowing individuals and home users to ‘opt’ their Wi-Fi access point into the network for a benefit – whether for money or otherwise. And the reason you want to offer up all the data on your laptop, smart phone and tablet to these home-gamers is…? Yeah, I couldn’t think of one either.
At iPass, we believe the future of Wi-Fi network provisioning and ownership lies with carriers and mobile network operators as Wi-Fi becomes an increasingly important aspect of our mobile data fabric. It’s no longer the fringe network; Wi-Fi is now an essential and integrated component of 3/4G mobility and data roaming.
That’s why iPass will continue to work with carriers and mobile operators, adopting their trusted networks and leave the home-gamer hotspot aggregation business to other players who are still wallowing in the fringe, and not doing business on the trusted network.
Tags: hotspot, internet access, mobile device, mobile employee, mobile network, roaming, smartphone, wi-fi access
