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…

Amenity Wi-Fi in Latin America

Posted on November 5, 2013

As in other regions of the world, cellular operators across Latin America are investigating ways in which curated amenity Wi-Fi can help them better meet the capacity needs of their networks while improving their subscribers’ overall mobile data experience. And there are very good reasons for them to be doing so. Here are just a few: Smartphone adoption is increasing dramatically across the region. For 1Q13, IDC reported a 53% uptick in Latin American smartphone sales over 1Q12. (And just last week IDC forecast a record fourth quarter across the world with smartphone sales likely to hit 1 billion units by the end of the year.) With smartphones in hand, user habits are changing, and more and more people are accessing more and more online content. (Our studies comparing 3G and 4G data usage show that when users convert to next-generation networks their overall usage—both cellular and Wi-Fi—increases.) In a 2012 Cisco study of wireless users in Mexico, they determined that mobile usage for wireless subscribers will see a 23X increase between 2011 and 2016. In the same study, they found that smartphone users access the Internet for data services 40% of the time and that 80% of respondents reported…