Amenity Wi-Fi Goes Mainstream
Posted on November 6, 2013
Recently I had the chance to talk to Light Reading’s Dan Jones about the changes taking place in amenity Wi-Fi. Dan had written previously about the Facebook/Cisco collaboration to offer stores a solution for free Wi-Fi, whereby consumers “sign in” with their Facebook credentials. He’d also written an interesting article after our conversation (which you can read here), so I thought I would expand on it with our perspective on wider market dynamics. Wi-Fi is one of the most important communications enablers we’ve ever experienced. In fact, with more than half of the traffic on our smartphones and tablets being carried by Wi-Fi, it’s arguably the dominant means of service access in use today. Despite Devicescape’s passion for Wi-Fi, our belief is that the combination of cellular and Wi-Fi is the most powerful—and required—way to deliver the experiences that users demand. (Read more of our opinions in the Always Best Connected post.) Wi-Fi has moved out of our homes and offices into the public arena in a big way. Amenity Wi-Fi, which we define as the shared Wi-Fi intended for guests and customers of businesses and public spaces, is a massive force and becoming more recognized as a mega-trend. Our…