With cable companies making significant investments in the sector, "carrier grade" Wi-Fi is rapidly overtaking "best effort" Wi-Fi, says back-end services provider Amdocs, releasing the results of a new study.
Commissioned by Amdocs and conducted by Real Wireless and Rethink Technology Research, the independent study found that carrier-grade Wi-Fi hotspots, which account for only 14 percent of public connection points today, will tally 72 percent by 2018.
By 2016, the report says, 77 percent of service providers will use "homespots," in which the routers of residential customers push out a separate SSID--up from 30 percent today.
In fact, 85 percent of cable operators plan to invest in carrier-grade Wi-Fi by 2016, the report says. By the end of the that year, 61 percent of MSOs' Wi-Fi hotspots and 70 percent of MNOs' hotspots will be sourced from third parties.
"Service providers are starting to see Wi-Fi as a strategically important offering that can enhance or damage their reputations and which needs to support a user experience comparable to that of cellular networks," said Oliver Bosshard, managing consultant at Real Wireless. "Best-effort Wi-Fi networks are not controlled from the operator's core network or operational support systems tools, and the access points often do not support any form of traffic management or prioritization. As a result, operators are unable to monitor or address performance issues such as congestion, meaning they cannot guarantee QoE--properties such as connection speed, latency or prioritization that are all critical to enable the monetization options for Wi-Fi."
For more:
- read this Amdocs press release
- read this Multichannel News story
Related links:
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