The afternoon session was kicked off by Richard Webb, Directing Analyst at Infonetics Research, who spoke to delegates about the latest carrier Wi-Fi market trends and operator strategies before introducing BandwidthX CEO Pertti Visuri, who spoke on how operators and Wi-Fi service providers can ensure the best value from Wi-Fi. One innovative new project highlighted by Perrti was the massive 40,000 access points per square kilometre being deployed by Ziggo in The Netherlands, with Perrti pointing out that it is no surprise that Wi-Fi is both popular and abundant when it costs 100 times less per gigabyte than cellular data.
It’s about market design
Perrti believes that it is high time operators recognized the need for better market design – the Nobel institute has done just this, since it awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2012 to Professor Alvin Roth for market design. Coincidentally he also sits on the board of BandwidthX. As Perrti put it, “When markets work right, everybody wins”. It is a strong bandwidth trading proposition.
On Wi-Fi advertising
Sebastien Tonkin, Vice President of Product Management at Boingo, spoke on the company’s successes with advertising strategies, telling delegates that when the average internet session lasts 51 minutes and takes in 68 pages, 50,000 words, 2856 links, 1836 images and 142 ads, how do you ensure you stand out from the crowd?
New value from roaming
Marcio Avillez, Vice President of Network Services at iPass presented on how to drive business value from Wi-Fi roaming, and what new business models can generate new deployments which in turn generate new revenue possibilities.
In the past, factors which hampered the development of Wi-Fi roaming were a general lack of awareness and surprisingly high costs, but it must now be viewed as a strategic thing; as Avillez said, people who previously didn’t see Wi-Fi as strategic are now beginning to see it as such and work it into their product portfolios and enjoy the upsell possibilities.
Over 96 per cent of travelers now consider an international Wi-Fi roaming service to be valuable – yet only 31.7% have one. Opportunities abound here.
Wi-Fi powering the 2012 Olympic Games
BT’s Chris Bruce revealed some big numbers and some great successes from BT’s delivery of Wi-Fi to the London 2012 Olympic Games. Stadiums always provide a challenge said Chris, since they are at the extreme edge of providing capacity – they experience an overload for two hours every so often but can then sit there empty for two weeks. There is also an emotional element to end-user expectation at iconic venues – everybody wants and expects Wi-Fi for free and it has to work. However, the financial imperative of providing the network means it must be connected to sponsorship or partnerships to make it viable.
BT delivered the largest high density public Wi-Fi installation in the world in 2012. 1,550 wireless access points, 5,500 kilometres of internal cabling, 16,500 telephone lines, 14,000 mobile SIM cards and up to 60 gigabytes of information carried each second kept the world communicating around the London Games. To put it into some social context, there were more tweets posted on any day of London 2012 than during whole of the Beijing Games combined. It was the most socially-connected Games ever. The upshot was six terabytes of data usage, nearly 700,000 sessions and just 15 calls to the BT helpdesk during the event.
On municipal Wi-Fi and disruptors
How operators are working to deploy Muni-Fi services was discussed in a panel session in the afternoon by Guglielmo’s Giovanni Guerri, Skyrove’s Ellie Hagopian and Thailand operator True Internet’s Dr. Attapol Wannasarnmaytha. The debate took in the various countries’ approaches to providing public Wi-Fi and how it is promoted. In Thailand the government, assisted by True Internet, provides public Wi-Fi and advertises it on bus stops, while South Africa is currently engaged in indicatives to bring cheaper internet access to people who can’t necessarily afford it. As Ellie Hagopian explained, in South Africa, probably the biggest barrier to municipal Wi-Fi is scale. It’s difficult to explain to people how the model and the funding works.
Skype’s Shadi Mahassel, Google’s Andrew Warner and BandwidthX CEO Pertti Visuri discussed new entrants to the Wi-Fi ecosystem and how they are approaching the market. Google currently has access-led Wi-Fi projects underway in emerging markets, while Skype is engaged in making it seamless for individuals to access Wi-Fi via easy payments and fewer barriers.
The afternoon session was concluded by Adrien Pitrat, Head of Usability at Bouygues Telecom, who delivered a fun and insightful presentation into practical problems and how the end-user utilizes Wi-Fi in the real world.
