With a little help – Cheap and Cheerful Wi-Fi wins the day

Monday, May 9th, 2011 Evan Kaplan, CEO

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.

Read the Press Release for more information.

Tags: carriers, Wi-Fi, wi-fi access