Smarter Wi-Fi for Mobile Operator Infrastructures

Introduction

The mobile-broadband market has reached critical mass thanks to fast networks, innovative applications, powerful platforms, and widespread user adoption. Operators are experiencing increasing data revenues even as voice revenues are declining. The business opportunity for mobile broadband is huge but also challenging. Users are clearly willing to pay for broadband service, but data usage is growing so quickly that it threatens to swamp the capacity of today’s networks. Operators are increasingly employing Wi-Fi as a means to offload user traffic. This can be done defensively to purely address capacity needs or as an offensive opportunity to leverage these Wi-Fi networks for new revenue flows.

This paper examines the market trends with respect to data consumption, explains the use of Wi-Fi for offload, and then presents new ways that Wi-Fi networks can be strategically employed to quickly gain capacity and coverage, in order to address raw bandwidth demand as well as to create a platform for new service capabilities. It concludes with a discussion of Wi-Fi technical challenges and how only appropriate carrier-class Wi-Fi equipment with appropriate technical features can fully meet operator requirements.

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