We recently had the opportunity to speak with Chris Bruce, Co-Chair of the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and Director of International Consulting Services at BT Global Services. BT is a multinational telecommunications company with head offices in London, UK. It has operations in around 180 countries; is the largest provider of fixed-line, mobile and broadband services in the UK; provides subscription television and IT services; and is one of the founding members of the WBA. Chris shared his thoughts on Wi-Fi, IoT, 5G, challenges facing the ecosystem, and more.
Chris Bruce speaks at the Wireless Global Congress in London, May 2017.
How is BT currently approaching the Wi-Fi landscape, and why is Wi-Fi important to the company?
BT was a very early adopter of Wi-Fi, and we operated the UK’s first Wi-Fi public hotspots on the same day that the UK government permitted the use of 2.4GHZ radio waves for the use of public Wi-Fi in 2002. Back then, BT was a fixed-line operator only and we viewed Wi-Fi as one important way to meet the needs of our users when they didn’t want to be tethered to a fixed line. In the years since then, the Wi-Fi market has matured significantly and BT has been a champion of Wi-Fi in the UK for the last 15 years.
A key moment was when we bundled BT’s Wi-Fi with our broadband propositions, for both consumer residential customers and business broadband customers. We also partnered with key venues in the hospitality, food & beverage, retail and travel sectors amongst others to locate our public hotspots on their premises as a destination for users to access Wi-Fi when they’re out and about. Nowadays, Wi-Fi is almost ubiquitous, and BT has 5.5 million hotspots and serves enterprise clients with both public and private Wi-Fi infrastructure. In 2016, BT completed its acquisition of EE, which is the UK’s largest mobile operator, and it also has the largest 4G network in the UK. Now, BT has the opportunity to deliver a truly best-connected service for its users across both licensed radio spectrum and unlicensed radio spectrum-based networks. We see this continuity of service across our different networks as a key focal point of our focus on user experience and meeting our customers’ needs.
In what ways is BT approaching other wireless technologies, such as IoT and 5G?
Going forward, the demand on networks – whether it’s fixed or mobile, or licensed/unlicensed – is only going to increase. We see the forecast for connecting users and the amount of data they consume is continuing to grow while the amount of content that they’re viewing, sharing and posting is following suit. Everybody wants to be online and available wherever they are at any given time, and this leads into the area of the Internet of Things (IoT). Businesses and residential customers want to connect things in addition to people This has the potential to change the way we lead our lives and the way in which services can be delivered to customers. IoT requires a different kind of network that can connect millions, even billions of ‘things. While this may only require a small amount of data to be transmitted, the challenge is simply that there’s so many connections. We see Wi-Fi and other unlicensed radio networks with low-power wireless LAN as being part of a hybrid solution of meeting the needs of the requirements of IoT depending on the use case.
In my view, 5G is potentially a network or network of networks that needs to serve the huge growth in data demand and content demand, along with the huge number of connections. BT believes Wi-Fi will continue to play a role in the future world, but with 5G, it’s a journey rather than the destination. BT will continue to take pragmatic steps towards what we’re calling the ‘5G Vision’ as an industry.
In your opinion, what are some of the biggest challenges facing the ecosystem, and how is BT addressing these challenges?
I believe there are 5 major challenges facing the ecosystem today:
User experience: The proliferation of different requirements and types of networks being available to serve the consumer is a positive, as this diversity allows us to meet different use-cases. However, I think the challenge for the industry is to make sure that all of this diversity and technology doesn’t simply land in the customers’ laps. The user experience and service must be coherent and it also must be intuitive and require minimal user intervention. This is partly a technical challenge and it’s also a commercial challenge – that is, we don’t introduce unnecessary barriers or step-changes that the user has to go through to consume the service. For example, you don’t want the user to disconnect from one service just to reconnect to another over some tariff issue. As operators, we need to work hard and ensure that the experience is seamless and intuitive without any undue surprises.
Commercial model: One of the challenges with Wi-Fi in particular is the expectation that it should be free and the industry has been working hard over the last 12 years to make it free at the point of consumption. The challenge then is around monetizing this in some way and there are many ways to approach this. Whether there’s a third party to subsidize the cost, or through advertising and other commercial elements, or whether it’s a coffee shop or another venue that offers Wi-Fi as a part of the overall service experience. I think we need to continually look at ways in which these models can evolve, and not allow commercial steps to get in the way of the customer consuming our product.
Rising costs: The data that is being consumed and transported across our networks is leading to higher costs. The challenge for operators is to manage down the cost of delivering this data faster than the price pressure that we face through competition, and we need to make sure that we continue to offer a service profitably and on a sustainable basis while managing our overall costs.
Connecting ‘things:’ A number of vendors, industry commentators and consultants have predicted that there will be between 20 and 50 billion things are anticipated to be connected to the internet in the next 5 years, which is an enormous number of connections. We need to understand how to manage this, and how to do it securely. I expect that security and the Internet of Things is going to be a very important issue, and it’s important that the industry works effectively with manufacturers to ensure that best practice in terms of security is implemented to protect those things and anything they can interact with.
Spectrum optimisation: The final challenge is optimising the use of spectrum across licensed and unlicensed networks. The radio spectrum is a finite resource, and its use was not planned from the very start – it has evolved over the decades as new technologies, services and use cases have emerged. Hence, chunks of the spectrum are already being carved out for various uses, such as television, military use, emergency services, etc. There’s always going to be a challenge when it comes to optimising the use of that spectrum, as well as finding ways to deliver service without using it.
As the ecosystem continues to evolve and we look ahead to 2020, what business opportunities do you see arising for BT?
The road to 2020 is the timeframe in which 5G networks are expected to start being deployed, and we expect these networks to address a number of use-cases, such as transporting data and broadcasting huge amounts of content as well as at the same time connecting billions of individually low value connections to ‘things’ Paradoxically a subset of those ‘Things’ will be highly valuable and require low latency networks to connect to (eg in health, finance or security applications) At the front-end of this will be the challenge of convergence as far as the user’s concerned, and if the end result of this technology and these networks is a seamless experience that users want to use, it will be a success for our industry as long as we can deliver it at the price point and performance metric that the market will bear for each use case.
When it comes to business models for IoT, there are a number of challenges in areas such as Smart Cities where the value in the service will not be in the cost of the network deployed, but rather in the data that’s being harvested and ultimately the service improvements that can be made using the data collected. The challenge will be in finding ways to incentivise different players in this new and emerging value chain.
How does the work of the WBA and its members play a key role in the wireless ecosystem, and why would you recommend becoming a member of the organisation?
The Wireless Broadband Alliance offers a comprehensive representation of the industry – both by geography and by industry type – that comes together to improve the experience to our users. If we succeed at this by interoperating our technologies and networks together, users will consume more, and the market will only get bigger, enabling us all to compete for the market. The WBA is creating the building blocks that allow service enablement to our customers. In addition to the key focus on Wi-Fi that is part of our heritage, the WBA is interested in bringing in related networks and technologies that can improve the ecosystem for all.
The organization is a very collaborative environment where operators, vendors, and cities work together to create the environment for delivering great services for our customers. It’s a great place to influence the future evolution of our industry, particularly on the path to 5G, and it offers valuable learning and networking opportunities.
Chris will be taking the stage at the upcoming Wireless Global Congress in New York City as a featured speaker. Learn more about the event and register for your pass here.
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