The Unexpected Tech

Network operators get serious about Wi-Fi

The world’s cellular industry is coming to Barcelona Spain next week for Mobile World Congress. But one of the key topics will be an entirely different radio technology: Wi-Fi.

At MWC, you’ll be see a massive change in the industry’s thinking about this unlicensed radio standard, now a standard part of smartphones, tablets, gaming devices, and even cameras. Faced with soaring mobile data demand, a range of network and service providers want to “tame” Wi-Fi, making it behave as conveniently, predictably, and reliably as cellular phone calls. Among other things, that change could spell the end of “free Wi-Fi.”

“There’s a re-emergence of the relevance of Wi-Fi,” says Andrew Borg, research director enterprise communications at consultancy Aberdeen Group.

Borg says carriers are turning to Wi-Fi in part to make use of unlicensed spectrum to offload data traffic from stressed 3G and even 4G networks, in areas dense with users and devices. But perhaps more important, the carrier embrace of Wi-Fi is an attempt to re-establish themselves as more than just a data connection. “Look at all the services and content being delivered on the mobile Web, by ‘over the top’ vendors like Google and Facebook,” Borg says. “Carriers have become a dumb pipe and don’t share in the revenue being generated by that content.”

New gateway technologies and industry specifications now make it possible to truly integrate Wi-Fi with the carrier’s core services, and to add intelligence that makes 3G offload and an array of other value-added services really viable, Borg says. Carriers can authenticate a user via a Wi-Fi connection, secure the link, share information with roaming partners for seamless hand-offs between access points, and, potentially, bill for some of all of this added value.