MNOs shouldn’t fear the Wi-Fi reaper

Devicescape says the ABC experience is ideal for operators

It’s not always that you get the chance to chat cosily with one of the big shakers and movers in the cellular world but GoMo News managed to grab a few minutes in London’s Fitzrovia with Devicescape‘s CEO, David Fraser. We were discussing the changing attitudes amongst the world’s mobile network operators [MNOs] towards Wi-fi as an adjunct to cellular data networks. It turns out that things have moved on rapidly from the days of ‘wi-fi offload’. Today, Fraser promotes his company’s ABC Experience as the winning proposition.

ABC stands for ‘Always Best Connected’ and the experience bit is a reference to the fact that the mobile subscriber should always be enjoying the best data connexion.

In effect, simple Wi-fi offload was intended to help out MNOs who’d yet to roll out their 3G or LTE networks.

Now, the ABC Experience is about customer retention and increased ARPUs [Average Revenue Per User] from data users.

GoMo News has published the actual figures before but what Devicescape has found is that integrating Wi-fi with cellular data in a highly successful manner leads to subscribers increasing their data overall usage.

Which helps raises ARPUs, of course. What the ABC Experience also does of course, is ensure an MNO has happy data subscribers.

The other major revelation that Fraser provided is that MNOs are moving away from an ‘exclusive’ model towards an inclusive one.

A good example here is the UK’s O2. This company has built up its own Wi-fi network but moved away from restricting it to paying subscribers.
Instead, O2 makes it Wi-fi network open to everyone. Which, of course includes smartphone and tablet customers subscribing to its rivals.

If you open up your Wi-fi network you can get into Big Data. You end up having access to real data from actual mobile phone and tablet users.

Which is great if you want to steal them.

Devicescape has, naturally, an interest in persuading MNOs to hook themselves into Devicescape’s massive virtual Wi-fi network.

But GoMo News reckons its arguments are very persuasive for the MNO community.