The use of network analytics in Wi-Fi is an area with great potential for network optimization as well as improving customer experience, according to Shahid Ahmed, managing director at Accenture and the lead for its North American Communications Industry practice.
“Wi-Fi, first of all, is unlicensed and inherently an open technology,” said Ahmed. “What that enables from an analytics perspective is a slew of data that you can get access to.”
Ahmed said that being able to access Wi-Fi analytics information opens up that technology for service providers, retailers and enterprises — or anyone who wants to build an app — to be able to deconstruct and examine all the Wi-Fi transactions between a user and an access point network. Wi-Fi analytics could be used to help maintain higher levels of reliability in unlicensed Wi-Fi, which needs to be managed dynamically, he added.
However, there are issues of privacy and security that come up with that level of openness as well, Ahmed noted, and a single transaction can provide significant amounts of information about a user and his or her history related to the access point network. He sees differences in how service providers would be likely to use such information compared to retailers, who can use it to tailor offers.
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