The afternoon session was kicked off with an overview of deployments and technical insights from Joe Madden, Principal Analyst at research house Mobile Experts. Joe spoke to delegates about his belief in carrier Wi-Fi and the concerns of mobile operators.

For years said Joe, operators were primarily concerned about coverage – it wasn’t about capacity, it was all about getting a tower up and getting as much out of it as possible. Then in 2011 and 2012, philosophy changed and we shifted into the capacity era. The key question became ‘What does it cost for a gigabyte of data?’ and operators started to think in terms of total cost and OPEX vs CAPEX.

Passpoint is just the start
Wi-Fi Alliance Marketing and Program Management Director Kelly Davis-Felner was next up, giving delegates an in-depth look at Wi-Fi Alliance activities and how it works with stakeholders to push the industry forward. The Wi-Fi Alliance addresses many areas, including connectivity, ease of use, security evolution, management, multimedia, band selection, deployment best practices and currently sees priorities emerging from agreement on requirements, through dialogue and debate with industry players and from making a clear business case across the ecosystem.

The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched seven new programs in 2012, of which Passpoint and Miracast were highlights. Passpoint addresses Hotspot 2.0, and the release 2 version of it will add features to support creation of accounts on the spot and how to make it easier for users to find hotspots recommended by their service provider. Miracast is designed to be an easy to use Wi-Fi display mechanism at the end point that lets users mirror content from a handset or tablet onto a big screen. What’s coming next? The Alliance is expanding its portfolio of Wi-Fi technologies, meeting massive demand for connectivity.

Further down the line the Alliance will be working on Neighbor Awareness Networking – low power device-to-device pre-association discovery suitable for highly mobile, large scale environments, White Spaces – providing additional spectrum for networking and distance connectivity, and also Wi-Fi Protected Setup – secure device pairing, similar to peering.

Kelly also took the time to explain how the Wi-Fi Alliance and WBA work together – the Wi-Fi Alliance being, she said, the technology experts, while the WBA is the post-connectivity specialist. As Shrikant agreed, the two organizations work very closely together and co-ordinate well.

The afternoon continued with a panel session on how to develop attractive Wi-Fi roaming and wholesale offerings to engage partners and drive revenues, featuring Andreas Overaasen of Telenor, Cedric Gonin from Orange and NTT Docomo’s Atsuhisa Shirai, all overseen by Philip Kendall of Strategy Analytics.

Overcoming operator problems
Wi-Fi Alliance CEO Edgar Figueroa presented a detailed outlook at how operator challenges can be overcome through technology solutions, in an industry where in 25% of homes and most enterprises around the world are equipped with Wi-Fi. Simply put, said Edgar, “People love Wi-Fi – around 50% of all data traffic today is over Wi-Fi, and it’s increasing. So now more than ever, the Wi-Fi and operator communities must work together for collective opportunity.”

Edgar joined Kelly in summarizing the great work that the Wi-Fi Alliance and the Wireless Broadband Alliance do together, with recent projects including 2009’s Tech transfer, the Liaison agreement in 2010, the 2011 Hotspot collaboration model and then 2013’s Framework to advance Passpoint/NGH adoption.

The key areas of interest for operators according to Edgar include seamless handover, band steering and selection, management, mobile multimedia and deployment best practices.

International data business models and changing users
China Mobile’s Ricky Chan was next up in the afternoon session to present on how to address the ways in which Wi-Fi Roaming has impacted changing user habits and behaviors, and how operators will need to adapt their business models accordingly.

The afternoon session continued with a look at the integrated future offered by the joint work being done by the Small Cell Forum and Wireless Broadband Alliance. Tiago Rodrigues and the Forum’s Mark Grayson spoke about their main clusters of activity, including the integration of small cell Wi-Fi on GSMA-WBA TF, the recent joint collaboration on Metro-ISW for NGH whitepaper – intended to outline methods and challenges of integrating small cell Aps and unlicensed NGH networks, and also the work done on Guidelines towards ISW architecture for NGH.

As Mark Grayson put it, it’s all about “Filling in the key gaps in the small cell industry.”
The afternoon session was concluded by Intel’s Robert Muir, with a presentation on the company’s vision for the evolution of Wi-Fi. With more and more demand for user experience around, and with devices forever evolving, Intel is focused on enabling all of these across IA platforms to deliver great user experience.

It was left to Chris Bruce of BT to sum up and hand over the Wi-Fi Global Congress to Beijing by saying what a great week it has been. Records have been broken, with 450 attendees for the event and the WBA now boasting in excess of 100 members.

See you in Beijing in November!