Cable Wi-Fi on a Hot Streak

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Jpatton0007 7/8/2013 | 9:12:12 PM

re: Cable Wi-Fi on a Hot Streak The two "Hurdles" were:

1. No business model that paid for WiFi... just 'free WiFi' at hotels..., thus not carrier grade, just sort of best effort... now the real promise of substantial data offload revenue drives MSO deployment of carrier-grade WiFi which will be required by the mobile operators paying for data offload.

2. Pre-802.11n WiFi stunk, comparatively... and mobile operators were frankly averse to deploying WiFi as a complementary technology because it was so non-carrier grade... however, with the advent of 802.11N and improved antenna technologies, WiFi today is at a point where carrier-grade is achievable, especially with deep-pocket MSO's planning/deploying vs local fly-by-night VARs

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cabbott 7/7/2013 | 10:53:29 PM

re: Cable Wi-Fi on a Hot Streak The most important factor in my mind is the seamlessness of the user interaction. At the moment logging into my MSO's hotspots is tedious and not worth the effort, especially since the reliability is spotty.

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nuker 7/6/2013 | 5:30:12 AM

re: Cable Wi-Fi on a Hot Streak What were the hurdles due to which WiFi was traditionally not planned well and not deployed to carrier grade standards ?

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ClausHetting 7/5/2013 | 8:46:35 PM

re: Cable Wi-Fi on a Hot Streak Great input. Cablecos in the US and elsewhere are in a tremendously powerful position to take market share (or at least substantial additional wireless traffic share) away from mobile carriers while expanding their own reach. I cannot emphasize enough that the 'gamechanger' here is the seamlessness of the user experience, i.e. that subscribers can roam between Wi-Fi networks (or when enabled between mobile and Wi-Fi) without any user interaction required on the device. One more important point: Wi-Fi is not inherently worse quality than mobile - it's just that Wi-Fi has traditionally not been planned very well nor deployed to carrier-grade standards. This does not mean that high quality Wi-Fi is not achievable. It certainly is, and there are many excellent solutions that include adaptive beam forming and all kinds of interference mitigation techniques. In addition to this, both 802.11ac and the use of the 5 GHz band (and more bands coming up from the FCC, presumably) will allow for more capacity and higher quality - even though the bands are unlicensed. Hotspot 2.0 is part of the mechanism for 'seamlessness' (but it is otherwise not quality related) and there are many other things in the pipeline, including standards that allow IP address continuity, intelligent network selection, etc. etc. All of this - I believe - is on track to fundamentally change the mobile/wireless landscape and markets over the next few years.

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