Editorial: Doubting mobile operators become Wi-Fi evangelists

New research produced for the Wireless Broadband Alliance suggests mobile operators are increasingly expecting to rely on Wi-Fi to cope with consumers’ burgeoning data demands.

Its key finding is that 22 per cent of all additional data capacity for the big mobile operators added during 2013-14 will come from Wi-Fi offload. It goes on to say that around 20 per cent of data traffic is transmitted on unlicensed frequencies, rising to an impressive 80 per cent in busy transport hubs and cafes.

It is pretty impressive when you consider that most of this data is sharing 100 MHz of spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band in comparison to the many hundreds of licensed MHz that are assigned to mobile operators.

The firm that carried out the research, Maravedis-Rethink, say that public Wi-Fi deployments will become more and more common as global roaming and Next Generation Hotspots take hold.

For spectrum management professionals, the move from licensed spectrum to unlicensed spectrum is well known. Only a couple of weeks ago, Virgin Media announced that its UK home phone customers could make calls on public Wi-Fi and only pay their usual landline rates. Effectively, they are giving their customers an incentive to use Wi-Fi rather than a mobile network (Virgin operates an MVNO in the UK using spectrum assigned to EE). Presumably it is cheaper to pay their customers to use unlicensed spectrum than to rent from spectrum licensees.

Mobile operators’ new found enthusiasm contrasts with the suspicions of Wi-Fi’s supposed unreliability they were talking about only a few years ago.

Clearly the telcos think that public Wi-Fi is a good place for their customers’ data needs. For consumers, it is a bit more tricky. So far, there have been no complaints about any decline in the quality of the service they receive. This could mean that consumers haven’t felt that their service has deteriorated, or at least not enough to kick up a fuss.

Alternatively, this could be part of a general trend where voice calls are less and less important in comparison to data, and where users are accustomed to unreliable services.

Or perhaps consumers just can’t get through to the complaints helplines because the Wi-Fi is so congested?