Centralized Wi-Fi Marketplace Could Revolutionize Mobile Data Usage

This article was originally published in Capacity and is republished here with permission.

These days, it seems the only thing more important to travellers than their Wi-Fi access is the suitcase containing their clothes. As consistent, high-speed mobile connectivity has become a must for people on the go, Wi-Fi availability has expanded from business offices, to retail outlets, to hotels, to everywhere in between – even airplanes.

However, a new approach may soon transform the way that Wi-Fi is purchased and sold. A process being called the marketplace approach promises a new way to optimise the management of a process that up to now has been cumbersome and inconsistent.

This approach could not only offer a new opportunity to spur usage and increase customer satisfaction, but also provide a critical cost-efficiency to many companies as they begin to migrate their operations to the internet of things (IoT). Here’s how.

Wi-Fi by the numbers
First, a look at the market. Wi-Fi has been around a while, but the increase in its projected use in the next few years is staggering. According to the Cisco 2017 Mobile Visual Networking Index Forecast, by 2020, Wi-Fi traffic will represent about three times as much as mobile data traffic.

What’s more, total public Wi-Fi hotspots (including home hotspots) will grow sixfold from 2016 to 2021, from 94 million to 541 million.

Yet, tapping this opportunity has so far not been easy.

Market challenges
On the upside, there is an ample supply of networks globally. The technology to enable seamless Wi-Fi roaming between partners is also readily available. Today’s tech-savvy consumers are well-versed in how to connect their phone or laptop to a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot quickly and easily.

Furthermore, there are a number of business incentives for operators and companies to offer Wi-Fi roaming access to their customers, either as a free value-added service or as an extra revenue source.

But despite these favourable conditions, Wi-Fi roaming has still not reached its full potential because of a single business challenge: Wholesale Wi-Fi procurement continues to be unnecessarily difficult.

Among other challenges, the process for establishing a successful bilateral agreement between sellers and buyers is currently a long and painstaking process that can sometimes take up to a year to complete. This is the result of a number of technical, business, financial and legal steps that have to be resolved.

The marketplace approach
It doesn’t have to be like this. For operators and service providers to fully benefit from Wi-Fi, it’s high time to automate and streamline the entire procurement process at the wholesale level.

The marketplace approach offers a way forward with this. It’s built around a centralised, user-friendly approach that is designed for telcos, service providers, and other businesses to consolidate all their searching and vetting of prospective partners into a single user-friendly process. Ideally, with this one-stop shop, they’re able to buy and sell Wi-Fi with the click of just a few buttons.

The idea behind this is to eliminate much of the cumbersome back-and-forth involved with managing wholesale agreements. Too often, sellers and buyers have to navigate the intricacies of determining coverage, pricing, legal requirements, and technical specifications, among several other areas.

Benefits for buyers and sellers
Even though the marketplace approach is only in its early stages, a process like this that allows the automation of the procurement process through a single, secure centralised hub offers immediate benefits to sellers and buyers of Wi-Fi alike.

A seller gains access to a global audience of prospective buyers that need to purchase the seller’s service quickly and easily. Although many mobile operators have embraced Wi-Fi as a way to address coverage gaps and congestion, or lower roaming costs while providing high-quality connectivity to their consumers, it can be overly challenging to find and negotiate with potential partners. The marketplace approach offers a centralized location for an operator to visually assess the coverage of the proposed Wi-Fi operator, understand its capabilities, and learn about its standard terms in a matter of seconds. This enables an operator to find the coverage it truly desires and the partners that can provide it, reducing time, lowering cost, and increasing time to market.

Likewise, for buyers, a single central, automated marketplace can simplify and speed up every step of the process – not only procurement, but connectivity, finance and roaming agreements. The buyer can choose a supplier, complete an agreement, and bring their Wi-Fi service to market more quickly than is possible now.

Paving the way for the IoT
Beyond sellers and buyers, the marketplace approach offers the benefit of enabling access and interactivity with previously unreachable partners to support the creation of new IoT application and services globally.

In fact, according to data from Maravedis, Rethink Research, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance, 67 percent of mobile operators and 78 percent of cable companies expect to use Wi-Fi to support their IoT services by 2020.

Additionally, Wi-Fi is expected to be widely used as a cost-effective mobile offload mechanism for IoT applications since cellular connectivity for IoT devices and services can be costly. For example, some IoT devices going into service today can use up an amount like a 5 GB monthly plan in less than a day. This points to a critical need for a more affordable means of connectivity.

Wi-Fi’s future
Wi-Fi will only continue to soar as a source of connectivity in the next few years. The development of a marketplace approach promises to not only drive usage and increase customer satisfaction, but provide a critical cost-efficiency as many company operations start to be migrated to the IoT. This is an exciting future that providers and consumers – as well as IoT-enabled businesses – should look forward to.