More efficient use of WiFi spectrum and smarter interference management could yield a US$17.9 billion windfall for mobile operators, claimed WiFi quality-of-experience (QoE) specialist XCellAir on Thursday.
"It’s in operators’ interest to take more control of WiFi, especially in locations where they want to provide more of a service as opposed to just purely offloading customers," said Todd Mersch, co-founder of XCellAir. "Not only does that make sense, in that your customers will have a better experience, but it also can deliver revenue."
XCellAir set about illustrating just how inefficiently WiFi is being used today by recreating a typical urban public WiFi deployment using 250 access points around its offices in Montreal, Canada.
Analysing the performance of the hotspots revealed that 92% of them do not switch to a different channel despite performance degradation caused by interference from neighbouring hotspots. Furthermore, on average, two channels worth of bandwidth remain unused at any given time, resulting in around 100 Mbps of untapped capacity.
XCellAir then commissioned Real Wireless to work out the potential cost-savings and revenue opportunity for a mobile operator that addressed these inefficiencies. The research firm modelled its calculation on an hypothetical mobile operator with a 25% share of the market, a limited amount of LTE spectrum, and an extensive WiFi footprint in New York City.
"We were pleasantly surprised how much financial benefit there was," said Mersch.
Real Wireless found that over five years, the operator would save $71 million by delivering capacity at a lower cost.
"Another $303 million essentially comes from being able to generate new revenue," said Mersch.
"A large percentage of that was being able to capture more price sensitive users" attracted to services like voice over WiFi (VoWiFi). This would have the effect of increasing the operator’s market share by 3% over the five-year period, he explained.
Scaling Real Wireless’ model to the world’s top 10 financial centres – London, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, Frankfurt, Beijing, Chicago, and of course New York – that combined cost saving and revenue opportunity comes to $17.9 billion.
Unsurprisingly, XCellAir claims to hold the key to making WiFi work harder for operators.
Its cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) enables any service provider with WiFi assets – be it an ISP, telco, or cableco – to monitor interference and spectrum utilisation across its WiFi footprint. It can automatically make the adjustments necessary – such as switching channels or tweaking power levels – to improve performance.
XCellAir has struck up relationships with unnamed cablecos in the U.S. and has met with operators and cablecos in Europe, as well as telcos and ISPs in India and the Far East.
"We’re starting trials right now with a view to starting commercial deployments in the middle of next year," said Mersch.
