August - 2015 - issue > CEO View point

Is Carrier Wi-Fi Monetization Built On A House Of Cards?

Rajesh Subramaniam, Founder & CEO, embedUR

Thursday, August 6, 2015

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Rajesh Subramaniam, Founder & CEO, embedUR

Wi-Fi hotspots are springing up like weeds. The latest high-profile example is in New York, where 10,000 former payphone sites will be converted to Internet kiosks equipped with an 802.11ac access point broadcasting Wi-Fi signals down the street. The first "Links" as they are called will go live by the end of 2015. Not to be outdone, the New York waste management company, Bigbelly, is proposing to upgrade several hundred garbage and recycling bins in New York City into Wi-Fi hotspots as well.

Carrier Wi-Fi is booming worldwide

Wi-Fi is everywhere, from restaurants to bus, rail and airport terminals, even trains and planes. The list goes on. Meanwhile broadband service providers have realized they are sitting on something big. With residential fixed broadband penetration in North America at approximately 80 percent and much higher in most of Northern Europe, the idea of upgrading each home's Wi-Fi enabled cable- or DSL-modem, to do double-duty with one SSID serving home users, and the other being part of Wi-Fi hotspot network, has caught fire.

The Cable Wi-Fi Alliance which consists of the five largest U.S. cable operators already has a Wi-Fi roaming network of about seven million such "homespots" which may double by 2018. British Telecom claims about five million across the UK. Every major service provider is following suit, eager for a Wi-Fi footprint they can use to horse-trade roaming agreements with other providers. Same goes in the Asia-Pacific region, with KDDI, China Mobile, SingTel and many others rolling out hotspots in the millions.

Wi-Fi Spectrum is getting Crowded