Black Friday 2013 – The Numbers Are In

Posted on December 9, 2013

Devicescape’s stats are in for the Black Friday and Thanksgiving week, and once again our users benefitted from high performance Wi-Fi connections in many top retail establishments while shopping for bargains. The numbers show big increases in Black Friday foot traffic at many U.S. merchants compared to normal levels. First, a quick note about the numbers: We collect all our statistics based on UTC times, so 11/29/13 in the charts (except where noted otherwise) is really 7 p.m. EST/4 p.m. PST on Thanksgiving Day through to the same time on Black Friday. That handily groups all the traffic from the stores that started their sales events on the Thursday evening, too, but it means that the late afternoon/evening of Black Friday is rolled into Saturday’s numbers. Target Target started their sale at 8 p.m. on Thursday night, and the stores near us were all very busy. The numbers indicate a 2.5X increase in foot traffic for that day. Although, by Sunday, the levels were dropping back down to near normal for weekends, so the Black Friday phenomenon still appears to be just the one-day event and not a whole weekend phenomenon.  Charts for Apple, Macy’s, and Barnes & Noble stores…

Curated Virtual Network

Posted on July 20, 2012

There seems to be a big misunderstanding about the way Devicescape's network is curated, and the types of location that are included. The venues that are part of Devicescape's curated virtual network are places like the cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels, libraries, hospitals, transit systems and retail establishments that installed free wifi for the benefit of their customers. Sitting at a bar, the person sitting next to me responds to the popup advising them of the availability of open wifi on their iPhone by connecting to the bar's network. Are they freeloading or leeching? Of course not! The bar owner installed the free wifi for their customers to use. My Android phone, running our software, was just one step ahead in that it automated that selection, getting me the best data connection it could find, rather than bugging me about it. They're not called smart phones for nothing. And at the same time, it checked the quality of the connection to make sure I got a good experience. As a consumer, I win by getting a faster, free connection to the Internet that doesn't eat into my cellular data allowance. The carrier that is paying us for the service wins by…

The Rise Of Retail WiFi

Posted on March 1, 2012

Everybody is used to free WiFi in coffee shops, airports and even restaurants, but perhaps less well known is the amount of WiFi in other public places, in particular retail stores. Our dashboard at Devicescape shows an increasing number of retail venues offering free WiFi. Topping the list of places you might not expect to find WiFi are The Home Depot and Sam’s Club, but there are entries in our reports almost every day from Macy’s, Nordstrom, Staples, Safeway, Whole Foods Markets, Winn Dixie and Kroger. And then there are the malls too, with the Macerich owned malls coming out as our clear winners in providing WiFi access to shoppers every day. Users Want It Our Q4 survey shows that over 80% of respondents would be more likely to visit a store if their device could automatically connect to free in-store WiFi. In many retail locations cellular coverage is poor or non-existent, so being able to have that “always on” data connection hop automatically onto a WiFi network makes a lot of sense. Even if you can’t call or text because your carrier connection has gone, you can still email, IM, Skype etc over the store’s WiFi network. In Store…

Black Friday: The Data

Posted on December 5, 2011

Michael has already taken a look at the Black Friday data we saw in our regular reports, and the reasons why WiFi might matter for retailers like Macy’s, Safeway and Home Depot to include free access in their stores. I’m going to look at this data from a different perspective completely, and think about what we can tell just from the connection trends we see, and whether there is an additional value that a retailer could gain from their free service in terms of what they can deduce from usage. The bar graph to the right (click on it to get a larger version) shows the percentage change in number of connections for each day of the black Friday week compared to the preceding week. As expected, all the networks in this sample showed a drop in traffic on Thanksgiving day. Interestingly, not to zero, but that might be partially explained by all the connection times being recorded in PST, so some of the early morning Friday connections from stores in more eastern time zones would have been counted as Thursday connections. Foot Traffic I’m sure all of these stores have detailed reporting on their sales over this period, but…

What Black Friday means to the Wi-Fi world

Posted on December 1, 2011

Black Friday has come and gone.  As usual, the yearly craziness ensues such as all night shopping sprees, near-riots at retailers, and sadly, the occasional assault for merchandise or in this year’s case, pepper spray attacks.  Now, the craziness will only continue as Chanukah and Christmas are upon us. Here at Devicescape we took it upon ourselves to analyze Wi-Fi usage and trends that emerged across our network during this year’s Black Friday frenzy. Since our virtual Wi-Fi network is made up of publically accessible Wi-Fi hotspots found around the world in places such as cafes, department stores, restaurants, hotels and airports to random shops that offer Wi-Fi as an amenity to their customers, we are able to track activity and connections within these available Wi-Fi network environments. What did we find? The obvious insight was that because of our millions of users, connections to in-store Wi-Fi spiked dramatically versus the week before. While the rise in connectivity is interesting, what gets my attention are the stores that offer some type of Wi-Fi service.  Stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and Barnes and Nobles bubbled up to the top of our network location list. So is it a surprise that these stores…

Online Video Watching Reaches Record High in October

Posted on November 30, 2011

The case for data offload onto Wi-Fi becomes clearer to me every day.  comScore just released its October statistics from its Video Metrix report and the current findings are astounding.  For the month of October, they cite 42.6 billion videos have been viewed which translates to approximately 21 hours on average per viewer.  It’s unclear how much data that really is but I think it’s safe to say that it constitutes A LOT. Admittedly, these stats don’t break out what type of device is streaming the content.  Therefore, it’s most likely a mix of desktop and mobile devices but in what quantities is uncertain.  Even if streaming to mobile i.e. smartphones and tablets is the lesser of the two, we’re still talking large amounts of data being streamed across wireless networks.  I can’t say with great certainty that the wireless operators are capable of handling the data presently across their networks without issue or even efficiently.  We’ve all experienced problems when streaming content at one point or another, and I’m not just talking about movies or music.  When it comes to simple web browsing, who hasn’t experienced lag?  But what happens in five years or even ten as data usage…