Posted on July 30, 2013
Over the past few years the term “Wi-Fi offload” has emerged from obscurity to become something of an industry category. In fact, as a market leader in this space, Devicescape originally used a tag-line “the Wi-Fi Offload Company” on our website and marketing materials. While it’s certainly helpful for the industry to rally around a term to help in classification, we’ve found that this offload-centricity is less accurate an indicator of what our customers truly need. With that in mind, we made a big change in the way we describe our solutions, and have moved beyond offload to new and more representative terminology. Devicescape’s mission is to help operators, and others, integrate Wi-Fi into their overall strategies to drive a set of benefits for their subscribers. These benefits are multi-layered and difficult to fit into a simple descriptor such as offload. Some operators may indeed want to focus on cost savings—by reducing congestion and traffic on their networks, or by reducing roaming expenses—and certainly our Curated Virtual Network (CVN) is a remarkably effective platform to accomplish this. But it’s clear that all operators care about offering a superior service to their subscribers, and that LTE has changed some of the…
Posted on July 22, 2013
Devicescape’s Curated Spot Check team recently visited Poland to conduct an on-the-ground assessment of amenity Wi-Fi in historic Warsaw. With nearly 40 million people, Poland is one of the European Union’s biggest countries and a great beacon for Eastern Europe. The team assessed Wi-Fi availability, attitudes, and quality throughout the city—from global restaurant chains to local businesses and tourist locations such as the Old Town Square. Here are some of the highlights: Both indoor and outdoor hotspots are in abundance. Tens of thousands of hotspots were verified across a small sub-section of the city center. Amenity Wi-Fi is a well-established component of the city’s modern business infrastructure—both password-based and the more consumer-friendly, password-free variety—at large multinational brands, smaller independent retailers, hotels, and at cultural locations. Public and private outdoor hotspots are fast emerging. For example, in recent years, Warsaw’s city government blanketed the city center with Wi-Fi, including the popular Royal Route, which begins at Warsaw’s Castle Square, runs south down the stately Krakowskie Przedmieście, and continues through the swanky Nowy Świat area. The Wi-Fi system is highlighted by “hotspot” street signs. Many of the city center businesses seem to rely on using this system, even though the signal quality…
Posted on July 17, 2013
In our curation of the world’s largest virtual network of Wi-Fi hotspots, we constantly refine Devicescape’s machine-learning algorithms to ensure that they perform optimally not only in the aggregate but also at the local city and street level. The ultimate form of local curation is what we call a “Curated Spot Check.” The Curated Spot Check process includes our QA team doing an on-the-ground assessment of the local Wi-Fi environment, and our marketing team conducting primary market research to evaluate the local views of venue owners and end-users. The Devicescape team compiles their research and fuses the local learnings back into our Curator Service for service providers and PopWiFi proximity marketing offering for venue owners. As we observe different cities around the world, we see two constants: an abundance of smartphones and a plethora of Wi-Fi networks. IDC reports that manufacturers will ship 918 million smartphones this year, which will account for 50% of all mobile phone shipments worldwide. As smartphone penetration continues to gather pace in global markets, more and more local residents, business travellers, and tourists will want to stay connected wherever they are―and often that means seeking out low-cost Wi-Fi. Venue owners increasingly deploy Wi-Fi in public…
