After three days of workshops and closed meetings, today marked the launch of the WBA’s Wi-Fi Global Congress presentation program which boasted an impressive 450 attendees! This was kicked off by the WBA’s Chairman JR Wilson (AT&T Mobility), whose opening address gave an inspiring insight in to the industry achievements of 2014 and exciting projects of what is to come in 2015. There was even a round of applause for all those who helped to make NGH live in San Francisco a reality. He revealed that there are already 4 billion Wi-Fi enabled devices in use and 70% of mobile broadband is carried over Wi-Fi.
Mohan Gyani introduced the morning’s speakers starting with Flavio Aggio, City & County of San Francisco who gave an overview of the city-wide deployment of Wi-Fi that includes 32 parks. He revealed that San Francisco has 40,000 public Wi-Fi connections daily with 2,000-3,000 concurrent. Dixon Doll from DCM highlighted that we need more unlicensed spectrum and stated that to achieve carrier grade, there needs to be even more collaboration between operators to ensure QoS. He said that Wi-Fi will become the primary network for video and data intensive communications with cellular becoming secondary.
Mark Nagel from AT&T Foundry described how the organization is supporting innovations in Wi-Fi and reveled that 82% of cars in 2018 will be Wi-Fi enabled connected cars. Selina Lo from Ruckus Wireless spoke about ‘Public Wi-Fi, the Perfect Storm.’ She commented that cities are trying to monetize their sites and monetize Wi-Fi where there is a race to grab best venues between operators and landlords.
Peter Jarich from Current Analysis introduced the presenters for the second half of the morning, starting with Hyun-Pyo Kim from Korea Telecom who detailed the benefits of the lifestyle application of Giga Wi-Fi. This was followed by Suraj Shetty from Cisco who highlighted that we still need to address issues such as interference management and fast roaming. He gave a great example of the power of Wi-Fi in action revealing that the Hyatt Hotel’s food and beverage revenue in lobby bar increased by 35% due to Wi-Fi being accessible. Matt MacPherson, also from Cisco, then came on stage to demonstrate a Geofence Wi-Fi experience in the room highlighting how to personalize the connectivity experience and potentially generate revenue.
Dave Fraser from Devicescape gave us an insight in to how to monetize the entire data experience. He stated that 29% of smartphone users never connect to home Wi-Fi and a surprising 83% find connecting to Wi-Fi too complex. An incredible one in every two customer-facing businesses in San Francisco offers amenity Wi-Fi but most of it goes under-utilized! This morning rounded off with a panel discussion on ‘Beyond NGH’ featuring Linktel, Telkom Indonesia, Wi-Fi Alliance and Orange.
Joe Madden from Mobile Experts opened the afternoon session by highlighting the importance of building the future of Wi-Fi technology. As moderator of the next panel, he introduced Tom Nagel from Comcast who revealed that they are seeing a massive 200 million sessions a month! The home is the core place where Wi-Fi is needed, followed by work, and then restaurants and Cafes. Rahul Patel from Broadcom followed this with an impressive statement about the huge explosion of video related data. By 2017, internet traffic will reach 865 Tbps, the equivalent of 720 million people streaming a high definition video continuously.
Alan Norman from Google asked what is next for Wi-Fi? The conundrum: Users want free Wi-Fi but we need to help venues justify the cost. Naomi Rosell from Microsoft highlighted poor visibility in network is an issue going forward and the growing demand for Wi-Fi for spectrum offload. Joe closed this session with a panel discussion on the evolution of licensed and unlicensed wireless technologies featuring Qualcomm Atheros, AMDOCS and Deutsche Telekom.
Adlane Fellah from Maravedis introduced Stephen Rayment from Ericsson who posed the question of what role will Wi-Fi play in 5G networks? The application possibilities are endless: automotive, consumer electronics and retail banking to mention but a few. But, unlicensed spectrum WILL be a key component of 5G networks. Next came the much-anticipated presentation from Dr. Hongseok Shin from SK Telecom who detailed the amazing Wi-Fi developments that are currently happening in Korea. He revealed that its users accounted for a massive 55% of the entire traffic during MWC 2014. Impressive stuff!
Adlane closed Day 1 of the conference with a panel discussion on Innovative Services over Wi-Fi featuring Cisco, Senion Lab, Front Porch and Purple Wi-Fi.
On Day 2, look forward to more exciting presentations from the likes of BT, City of San Francisco, Telkom Indonesia, CableLabs, Biglobe, Boingo Wireless and iPass. See you there!
