Richard Webb, Directing Analyst at Infonetics Research spoke to delegates about some industry trends and what stakeholders can expect from the Wi-Fi space moving forward.

The Wi-Fi market has been enjoying steady growth year on year for around the past six years said Webb, thanks in part to the fact that providers have ceased considering Wi-Fi as a dirty word. The technology has now very much been embraced by all industry players, with the consistently increasing number of hotspots offered lending evidence to this. The proliferation of Wi-Fi as a hotspot service is now very real.

The market has been driven along primarily by mobile operators, thanks to the exponential growth in data demand creating a need for them to offload network traffic over Wi-Fi. Another likely market driver coming soon according to Webb will be the upgrading of Wi-Fi access points to the new Wi-Fi 802.11ac protocol.

In line with the afternoon’s core theme of how to monetise Wi-Fi, Richard revealed the latest Infonetics predictions on the long-term growth of the sector; the analysts forecast that Wi-Fi revenues will hit $3.9 billion in calendar year 2017, while the number of access points will grow to 9.9 million.

Why are carriers turning to Wi-Fi?
Because it is key to one of the industry buzzwords currently cited as vital in mobile operator business strategies; densification. Bringing blanket coverage and capacity to end-users wherever they want it requires a blend of solutions and technologies to deliver it. As Richard pointed out, small cells are only a part of the solution. Wi-Fi has to be complementary element of deployments strategies.

Operators are even employing the term ‘onload’ now, so keen are they to get traffic onto the network by any means necessary, to continue meeting customer expectations and delivering a high Quality of Experience (QoE). To help them achieve this, they are increasingly realising the value inherent to a collaborative cellular small cells and public Wi-Fi solution.

The end-user experience runs through the core of operators’ Wi-Fi deployment mentality too now. Users have become adept at searching for Wi-Fi the moment they enter a venue today, with taking their smartphones out of their pocket and checking for a Wi-Fi network signal the moment they enter a mall, airport, stadium or similar is now simply second nature.

Some new economics
The economics of offload are also important to mobile operators – Wi-Fi delivers them lowest cost per bit, a factor which gains significance as indoor usage increases in prevalence over outdoor use.
The economics are also present in the next key development in the industry – Hotspot 2.0, the mechanism that brings Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity together in one box and gives end-users a product which is more than the sum of its parts.

Challenges remain
There are of course still challenges that operators must confront and overcome; the choice of radio access options poses a question, while there is also an imperative to make subscriber connectivity easier while also more secure. Operators need to decide on traffic steering options too, whether to offload at the access point itself, to offload at the mobile edge or to backhaul traffic into the mobile core.

Other factors which impact on end-users include traffic management, and how operators will manage seamless handover across access points or how to deliver seamless handoff between the cellular layer and the Wi-Fi. Subscriber management will also play a part, with operators needing to address factors such as authentication, billing, policy enforcement, DPI and lawful intercept without them becoming problematic. And there is the ever-present issue of security.

In summary
Operator Wi-Fi priorities according to Infonetics focus on maintaining data throughput, service continuity of mobile and Wi-Fi plus the twin goals of revenue protection and churn reduction. The future is undoubtedly bright, with 54 per cent of operators surveyed by Infonetics reporting that they are already looking into offering dual-mode Wi-Fi/mobile service and 88 per cent saying that they already deploy carrier Wi-Fi in coffee shops, bars and restaurants.

As Richard concluded, “There is an awful lot of this stuff coming and so we have got to make sure that it pays for itself!”