An estimated 45% of global wireless traffic was offloaded to Wi-Fi hotspots or femtocells last year, according to Cisco, and this amount is projected to increase each year until offloaded traffic surpasses that which stays on the mobile network. Cisco’s VNI projects that by 2017 Wi-Fi will account for 48% of the global IP traffic and cellular for 10%.
Cable operators were leaders in deploying service provider Wi-Fi, but wireless carriers are catching up quickly. AT&T now claims the nation’s largest Wi-Fi network, and the roll-out of Wi-Fi hotspots by carriers is projected to increase 13% per year through 2018.
Cisco, which now has more than 200 service provider customers for its carrier grade Wi-Fi technology, says the real value of service provider Wi-Fi is the information it can provide to operators. The company’s mobility service engine provides analytics and a platform for offering location-based services to users. Network operators can see how people move through a venue, where they spend their time and potentially where they spend their money.
While carriers are still exploring the new services that Wi-Fi can enable, the need to use Wi-Fi to increase network capacity is already clear. A survey of tier-one mobile network operators conducted last year found that the group as a whole expected 22% of added capacity to come from public Wi-Fi.
Private Wi-Fi hotspots are also playing in important role in expanding network capacity, especially in Europe. European operators have convinced customers to share their home access points with one another, creating a “homespot” network to leverage capacity that might otherwise be wasted when homes are empty. In the United States, Comcast is adopting the homespot model, asking customers who use its Wi-Fi routers to share access with one another.
Ironically, the faster speeds and greater capacity offered by LTE have not decreased customer Wi-Fi use, even though LTE can handle many of the videos and large files that drove 3G customers to Wi-Fi connections. According to SK Telecom, 3G users consume an average of 86.2 megabytes per month over Wi-Fi networks, while LTE users consume almost twice that amount, at 146.3 megabytes per month. A similar trend was reported by Devicescape, which manages a network of curated Wi-Fi hotspots for carrier customers. Devicescape found that on its network 4G users consume double the amount of data over Wi-Fi networks that 3G users consume: 2018 megabytes per month for 4G, versus 1010 megabytes per month for 3G.
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