Posted on November 22, 2011
Chalk it up as another banner quarter for Devicescape. On the heels of growing to over 4 million hotspots globally, Devicescape just released its Q3 2011 Wi-Fi report. What’s interesting about this quarter’s report is that I’m seeing some wavering in service provider loyalty. Being a long-time Verizon Wireless subscriber myself, I assumed that most people were like me and would be resistant to carrier switching. Unless of course it’s a hardware matter such as getting an iPhone but that has become irrelevant since Verizon now carries that smartphone. Data capping has become more and more of a subscriber concern over the last year with major carriers announcing intentions to get rid of unlimited data plans. Although the reality is that most people don’t come close to the proposed plan caps, the idea of taking away consumer value from their plans is perceived as a hit to the consumer experience. In the Devicescape report, 88% of respondents said that unlimited data plan offers would sway purchasing decisions. If the mobile operators want to avoid carrier switching, they better come up with some solutions and educate their subscribers. Data usage is only going to increase over time as rich content such…
Posted on November 11, 2011
I’m sure many of you have heard that the World Broadband Alliance just released their report titled “Global Developments in Public Wi-Fi”. If you haven’t seen the report, you may have read one of the many articles that cite its many statistics. The most significant statistic that’s been brought to our attention is the projected number of hotspots by 2015. WBA projects 5.8 million hotspots. (We at Devicescape can confidently say there are significantly more but that’s a whole different discussion). The point being is that WiFi is pervasive. We all expected that though. Blogger Kevin Sandlin on the CWNP blog poses an interesting question. What will the state of WiFi be like beyond 2015? He cites the WBA report, a Cisco report on their Networking Index and Forecasts, and IDC data. In my view he doesn’t make any bold predictions but he does point out something interesting. From the Cisco report, he states that by 2015, WiFi will consume 37.2 exabytes of data versus 37 exabytes for wired and 6 exabytes for cellular. The traffic over WiFi is 6x that of cellular. So “mobility” as we know it today will really just be WiFi down the road. I think…
Posted on March 26, 2009
Having a user base in excess of one million enthusiastic members gives us a great opportunity to query the habits, desires, and problems facing Wi-Fi users today. With that in mind, we’ve decided to conduct regular surveys of our membership, where we can ask insightful questions of this leading-edge community. We plan to conduct the survey quarterly, and publish the results in a piece of original research that we call “The Devicescape Wi-Fi Report”. Catchy huh? 😉 We conducted our first survey in January and have now published the first Devicescape Wi-Fi report for Q1, 2009. Some of the things we learned were quite surprising, while others simply confirmed what we already knew. Here’s a sample of what we learned: Most users want Muni Wi-Fi and (surprise!) they’d be willing to pay for it like a utility Most users prefer Wi-Fi to 3G and want it built into all phones and bundled with cellular plans People like iPhone Wi-Fi best while on the road (no surprise!) Now that the first one is done, we’re working hard on the Q2 report. We plan on probing more deeply and hope to invite our friends in the industry to participate through crafting good…
Posted on December 19, 2008
Devicescape passed a cool milestone this week: 1 million registered users for the Easy Wi-Fi application. Of course, as I write this, I’m immediately reminded of the scene in Austin Powers where Number Two has to disabuse Dr Evil that his $1M demand is impressive. In the web world, 1M is “no big deal”. After all, Facebook just published their user base and it was something insane, like over 130 million! Still, in the world of Wi-Fi, we think 1M is a good number, and we’re certainly quite proud and even a little surprised. It wasn’t that long ago that we were monitoring single digit daily registrations and logins. So, many thanks to all of our membership out there. Your feedback, enthusiasm and, yes, criticism, has been much appreciated and truly helpful in making more and more out of our service. Now that we’re at this milestone, we’re thinking “what’s next?” and planning for the future. We have lots of cool ideas in mind. Please do try to drop us a line on what you’d like to see: leave a post in our forums, on the blog, or even PM us directly. Thanks again.
Posted on November 26, 2008
It’s Thanksgiving week here in the US, and while I’m a Brit, I’m always happy to celebrate somebody’s holiday with them! So, for those who will be enjoying large meals and catching up with their family over the long weekend, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. And for everybody in our global community, whether you’re on holiday or at work, I thought I’d throw out some statistics about Wi-Fi usage, internet usage and Devicescape usage that I thought were interesting. Mobile Internet I was presenting at a JETRO Houston event last week where one of the many interesting things I learned from my co-presenters was that in the late teen to early twenties age range, more people access the internet through a mobile device than with a computer or laptop. And the next couple of segments in that chart weren’t far behind either. Japan has a great mobile data infrastructure to support this of course, and a lot of public access Wi-Fi networks, all of which help to make mobile access simple. The real surprise for me though was the low number of smartphone users (around 2% of mobile subscribers). I’m sure with the popularity of devices like Apple’s…
Posted on June 15, 2007
The Devicescape community has been growing over the past six months, and more and more people are taking advantage of automatic logins at the hotspots they use regularly. But what are the top networks that Devicescape members are using? The top ten networks that we see our members using are: FON T-Mobile US/UK (tmobile) Boingo‘s CONCOURSE Network, USA Orange, France NTT DoCoMo Mzone, Japan (docomo) T-Mobile/T-Com, Germany BT Openzone, UK BB Mobilepoint, Japan NTT Communications HOTSPOT, Japan (0033) Airborne Access, Philippines Quite an international group, with networks from Asia, North America and Europe all represented (and the top 15 includes South America too). Of course, since FON is a worldwide network, the top 10 might include users from many more places. Tell us where you use Devicescape most often, or where you’d like to use it – leave a comment, or post something in our forums.
