Claudia Bacco, Managing Director – EMEA for RCR Wireless News, has spent her entire career in telecom, IT and security. Having experience as an operator, software and hardware vendor and as a well-known industry analyst, she has many opinions on the market. She’ll be sharing those opinions along with ongoing trend analysis for RCR Wireless News.
Will 2015 finally be the year when carrier-grade Wi-Fi evolves to become an integral part of the heterogeneous network landscape? Birdstep Technology thinks so.
I recently had an opportunity to speak with Lonnie Schilling, CEO of Birdstep Technology, to discuss this topic. Specifically the importance of Wi-Fi in a carrier’s hetnet strategy and the role it can play in the evolving connected car market. “Everyone continues to question Wi-Fi’s role,” said Schilling, “Wi-Fi is here to stay.” He went on to say “we have passed the hype phase surrounding carrier-grade Wi-Fi and are now seeing it deployed as an integral part of overall service architectures from [mobile service operators], fixed-line, [mobile network operators] and even [mobile virtual network operator] players.”
As we move beyond deployment for purely connectivity reasons, the opportunity exists to utilize Wi-Fi to drive location-aware marketing activities. By using solutions such as Birdstep’s Easy Analytics, an operator is able to track the customer experience of its Wi-Fi customers and ensure they are acceptable through modification of policies and deployment footprint as required. Additionally, they could partner with retail establishments to offer marketing programs based on this data. Consider this – an operator deploys public Wi-Fi and partners with local retail establishments. The user signs on to the Wi-Fi network and is offered specials from the shops located in that area.
Moving on to the connected car. Is the connected car an actual “mobile” device as many describe, or more of a nomadic one? Or think of this difference as always on-the-go vs. moving from place to place and stopping for some period of time in between. In this context a car is really a nomad, considering most of them spend more time parked than being driven. Given that definition, does a car really need an always-on cellular connection? Maybe the answer is a mix of cellular and wireless. Can a car utilize a Wi-Fi hot spot provided from outside of the car to conduct required updates? In some cases, definitely.
The connected car will enable operators to migrate their home connections to the car. Think about this scenario: You park your car outside your house/in your garage at night. Some of these parking locations don’t facilitate cellular coverage. OEMs usually plan remote diagnostic and update activities in the middle of the night when the car isn’t being used. What if your in-home Wi-Fi was used for this connectivity and your car/home could make that connection without your live involvement. This helps to solve a lot of concerns in the market today as to who pays for the connectivity required for these updates – the OEM or the driver?
Our discussion shed a lot of light on options for carrier-grade Wi-Fi coming of age, not only to adjunct the network, but to move into enabling marketing services for monetization of the deployment of this infrastructure and further integration of smart cities, homes and cars toward a more connected society.
Schilling brings 20 years of experience of equity investment, strategic business development, architecture sales and marketing within the international communications market. He was most recently director, mobile service provider sales and business development at Cisco and he has also held leading management positions in other global companies such as Motorola, ITT, Worldview Technology Partners and Bolt Beranek and Newman. Schilling holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland. He completed graduate and postgraduate studies at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, the International Institute for Management Development, INSEAD and the Marshall School of Business at USC.
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