After the excitement of yesterday’s awards ceremony, Day 2 of the conference program was kicked off by the WBA’s Co-Chairman Chris Bruce (BT) whose opening address recapped yesterday’s events, introduced the notion of a ‘Wi-Fi Onesie’ and gave an interesting overview of the UK wireless landscape. He revealed that 7 out of 10 people now feel safer online in Scotland and the future of Wi-Fi needs to be ‘citizen centric’. Sustainable monetization is also key!
Chris introduced Miguel Gamiño from the City of San Francisco who gave an inspiring talk on the city-wide Wi-Fi deployment that has closed the digital divide in the community and provided local community groups with wireless connectivity that was previously unavailable. This roll out consists of 3.1 miles of fiber along Market St and Miguel projected that HotSpot 2.0 will expand within the Bay area and beyond.
Tom Lookabaugh from CableLabs spoke about leveraging the Cable Community Role in Public Wi-Fi, highlighting the importance of community Wi-Fi, an initiative it is working on in partnership with the WBA. Pramasaleh Hario Utomo from Telkom Indonesia gave a fascinating insight into the challenge of providing Wi-Fi connectivity in this region of 13,000 islands! Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world and has 42 million internet users, the 13th biggest user in the world. This operator deployed over 2,000 high-density access points for the APAC Conference and has rolled out 5,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in the city of Bandung.
Steve Hratko from Ruckus Wireless rounded off the session with a panel discussion on ‘City Wide Deployments – Challenges & Benefits’ featuring the City of San Francisco, the City of San Jose, Ruckus Wireless and Global Reach.
Hillol Roy from IBBConsulting kicked off proceedings for the second half of the morning and Yoshiyuki Koseki from BIGLOBE gave some insight in to wireless connectivity landscape in Japan. He stated that between 50-60% of Japanese households are connected to Fiber in the home. Derek Peterson of Boingo Wireless stated that 91% of those surveyed said mobile devices were the object they would least like to lose in life. He also highlighted the ownership paradox – you have multiple owners of your digital life through various apps etc., so let’s start developing collaborative ownership to give consumers what they want.
Evan Kaplan from iPass impressed the audience with this fact: there is 1 hotspot for every 150 people on the planet today; 50% of them are controlled by brands whose core business isn’t telecom. He also brought a few challenges to the fore, the fact that operators put a lot of friction between themselves and the user and that we still have immature monetization, free doesn’t always mean good. “One size doesn’t fit all,” he said as there is no one monetization strategy. His mantra – Stop waiting; Start Trading; Think Global!
Hillol rounded off the session with a panel discussion on ‘Emerging market opportunities on Wi-Fi’ featuring Telus, Elitecore and Aptilo.
The afternoon split in to two streams. The business stream featured Steve Dyett from BT, Howard Buzick from Boingo, Pertti Visuri from BandwidthX and Brodie Kirkeby from Cloud4Wi. The innovation stream featured presentations from Mark Dahm from Elucid, David King from Airtight Networks, Chris Spencer from Global Reach and Bryan Mikesh from AT4Wireless. The day ended with in-depth strategic clinics focusing on NGH/Passpoint and Wi-Fi Roaming/ICP.
That brought us to the end of this year’s Wi-Fi Global Congress! Thank you to all the sponsors & participants and see you at the next congress in London 18-22 May 2015.
