By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi offload – the concept of driving phones to connect automatically and securely to high-capacity Wi-Fi networks when indoors – is the closest to a no-brainer proposition that you will currently find within the telco-world. There are reasons why the scheme has not been widely adopted yet. But those reasons are evaporating fast. We believe the Wi-Fi offload revival is coming soon to a place near you.
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If you’ve been in the Wi-Fi business for as long as me you may remember the concept of Wi-Fi offload – it was much-hyped and even considered disruptive a decade or so ago. Since then the idea – which is simply the idea of driving phones to use Wi-Fi networks where available – has been living a life in anonymity. This is – we predict – about to change. And there are a number of very good reasons for it.
The first reason and basic principle is this: Indoor 5G coverage is predictably bad in a lot of places – but why invest in pricey indoor cellular solutions when there’s Wi-Fi nearly everywhere indoors? (and if there isn’t, it is low-cost to build). There really has never been fewer reasons for kitting out your venue with cellular in-building coverage. Even voice calls have long since moved into the Wi-Fi domain. Good Wi-Fi is all you need indoors at any venue, enterprise, or building of any kind.
The second reason is spectrum – and loads of it. Today we have 1200 MHz of pristine Wi-Fi spectrum in the 6 GHz band (or 500 MHz in some regions) and in many cases this is multiples of what any single carrier would ever have for 4G or 5G. This means that indoor wireless capacity with 4G or 5G can only be substantially worse than with 6 GHz Wi-Fi. It is time that all carriers realise this fact and begin to make plans to adopt Wi-Fi offload technology to serve their subscribers with better connectivity indoors.
So what technology is this exactly? Most – but not all – solutions require Passpoint to be adopted on devices. In some markets this is already a done deal with large carriers provisioning phones with Passpoint certificates out of the shop. In other countries and regions – such as in Europe – we still need to get there (although there really is no reason why this would not happen). Add to this that someone needs to provide the ‘roaming’ (zero-touch authentication) service. Thankfully, there are a few of those.
At Wi-Fi NOW we will shortly be focusing a lot more on the ‘Wi-Fi offload’ (or ‘convergence’) story including at our Wi-Fi World Congress coming up this September in Toronto, Canada. Don’t miss it – check it out and get your ticket here.
/Claus.
