Location, Location, Location

Posted on January 8, 2015

Talk to any estate agent or realtor (depending where you live) and they’ll tell you that location is the most important thing when it comes to selling property. Is it a nice area? Is it easy to get to? Does it have good access? Decent restaurants nearby? If you’ve got the right location, you’ll have eager buyers queuing up, quite literally, at your door. What the agent won’t talk to you about is security. They won’t ask you about your window locks, how long you think it might take to kick that nice shiny front door off its hinges, or (unless you’re in Hollywood) whether you’ve got a panic room with a ten-inch steel casing in your basement. That doesn’t mean security’s unimportant. Far from it; some people might hark back to the days when you could leave your door unlocked without concern, but nobody really wants to test human nature like that today. Security is very important to home buyers but it’s just one element of an entire package that gets weighed as people contemplate tying themselves down to a 30-year mortgage. But it’s always location that comes out on top. When you’ve moved in, and you do start…

Does Wi-Fi First herald the final curtain for mobile operators?

Posted on November 11, 2014

Rivalry makes for a far better narrative than co-operation, as the plots of countless literary works illustrate. What’s interesting, though, is that many of the great tales of conflict end in reconciliation; usually when both sides have learnt the folly of that conflict to their cost. The story of Wi-Fi and cellular might lack the literary clout of, say, Romeo and Juliet, but that tension between competition and conciliation is present nonetheless. I was struck by this as I read a very interesting story on CNN suggesting that end users might soon be able to do without cellular service thanks to the enormous growth in Wi-Fi. http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/07/technology/mobile/wifi-mobile-carrier/ Just as Shakespeare’s famous play would be a lot less famous if the Montagues and Capulets had sorted out their differences at the beginning rather than the end, so a story that threatens calamity for one party or another stands a greater chance of exposure than one which heralds collaboration. It’s a provocative headline, and perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek. The reality is that the tale of conflict between Wi-Fi and cellular is all but over; the industry realizes that both are necessary, both can thrive and both can win. What’s important is to…

Hot-Spot the difference: Public Wi-Fi vs Club Wi-Fi

Posted on November 10, 2014

Recently Maravedis Rethink issued a report predicting huge growth in public Wi-Fi. The research forecast the availability of 47.7 million public Wi-Fi hotspots by the end of this year, growing to 340 million by the end of 2018. That is exciting and underscores the increasingly ubiquitous nature of Wi-Fi and its established position as a key network for consumers and service providers. Interestingly, most of this Wi-Fi – almost 40 million of the 2014 year-end total, in fact – is community Wi-Fi, which at Devicescape we refer to as “club Wi-Fi.”  Broadband providers deliver it by making a small but important change to the capabilities of the routers and modems their customers use in the home. Instead of the routers being purely for private use, the software is modified so that a portion of the bandwidth can be accessed by any of their other customers. Since there are millions of domestic customers using these routers, a large network can be built pretty quickly. And, if you can somehow link all of these disparate Wi-Fi networks from different service providers together, you can create get a single, over-arching network, which allows roaming for anyone in the club. Sounds great! Here are a few…

Everybody’s doing it…

Posted on October 20, 2014

The use of Wi-Fi as a customer relationship tool is really starting to fly. To pick three examples on a theme from the news in recent weeks: Numerous airlines are launching in-flight services (with a view to one day replacing costly, heavy in-flight entertainment systems), e-Bay is sponsoring free Wi-Fi at airports in Brazil and, if the reports are on the money, Facebook will be testing airborne Wi-Fi drones in 2015 as a means of distributing internet connectivity to the significant minority who remain beyond the reaches of established networks. Down on the ground, meanwhile, Coca Cola is turning its South African vending machines into Wi-Fi hotspots to reel in buyers. There are two trends at play here. On the one hand you have companies that depend on user access – like e-Bay and Facebook – pushing to make that access more widely available and affordable. On the other you have companies that recognize the importance of connectivity from the user’s perspective offering it as a brand enhancer or giveaway inducement. That, at least, is nothing new. Thirty years ago Coca Cola was giving away yo-yos; now it’s giving away Wi-Fi. There probably aren’t as many kids today interested in…

Hotspot 2.0 or Hotspot Oh.No: My Carrier Wi-Fi Experience at MWC

Posted on March 7, 2014

Wi-Fi—and its Carrier Wi-Fi subset—has become a critical component of mobile network operator strategy.  Carrier Wi-Fi has undergone several redefinitions, but the next generation vision focuses on Hotspot 2.0, also known as “Passpoint.” Theoretically, Hotspot 2.0 provides a seamless connection experience for smartphones by utilizing the SIM card for authentication and leveraging 802.11u to advertise services and roaming partner availability at a particular hotspot. Hotspot 2.0 has been slow to gain traction, and it’s generally been complex to deploy.  Given this history, I was excited to hear that Hotspot 2.0-enabled services would be made available at Mobile World Congress (MWC)—the yearly Telecoms industry confab held in Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via—and that I would be able to roam seamlessly using my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S4, one of the first Passpoint-certified handsets. I was looking forward to just turning on my phone and connecting; however… Here’s what actually happened. Prior to arriving at the show, I set my Galaxy S4 for “Passpoint” mode.  On arriving at the Fira, my phone couldn’t find any surrounding Passpoint hotspots, so I opened up the Wi-Fi settings and took a look around.  These were the two hotspots I could see in my phone’s scan list: I…

The Amenity Wi-Fi Owner’s Dilemma: Ease of Use Versus Compliance

Posted on December 3, 2013

Two common themes about publicly available Wi-Fi circulate constantly in the press:  security (for users), and abuse (by users).  I find these issues fascinating because they position users at opposite ends of the spectrum. There’s the hapless user whose secrets are being stolen, and there’s the terrorist/ identity thief whose using free (and supposedly anonymous) network access for their own nefarious aims. Let’s take a moment to examine these topics. Security is not to be taken lightly, but in our view security of public Wi-FI has been over-dramatized as the problem. The argument goes that public Wi-Fi is insecure because of the “open” (read unecrypted) nature of the link from your phone, PC, or tablet to the W-iFi access point in the bar, hotel, or café.  The weak part of the debate is the fact that even if the link itself was “secure”  (read encrypted), then beyond the Wi-Fi access point and all through the Internet your traffic would be unencrypted and fully exposed! That has absolutely nothing to do with public Wi-Fi being open or secure. To resolve this, users need end-to-end encryption, from their device right the way through to the receiving service (i.e. their bank). In fact,…