Smart Wi-Fi drives data offload

Based on data recently released by Validas, which analyzes the mobile-phone bills of consumers, T-Mobile looks to be the only US mobile operator able to control its data surges from increased smartphone usage.

An article in Fierce Wireless reported Validas' research compiled between June 2010 and July 2011. It showed Verizon with the highest percentage of increase in data usage with AT&T second and Sprint in third place. Yet T-Mobile had a slight decrease.

Is T-Mobile able to increase data offload because of Smart Wi-Fi? It is the only operator of the four with an active and successful Wi-Fi data offload service -- Wi-Fi Calling, based on Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi technology.  Smart Wi-Fi gives T-Mobile subscribers a reason to connect their smartphones to Wi-Fi – and thus offload the cellular network.  So it would follow that its offload is very positively impacted and that is what sets it apart from its competitors.



With data surges developing into a major issue for mobile operators, competitive solutions abound. Could T-Mobile have found the one that truly has an impact? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Give us our Wi-Fi! US & UK Survey Reveals Consumer Demand for Wi-Fi Services

Seventy eight percent of people in the United States and 74 percent of people in the United Kingdom who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities would be interested in an application that would use Wi-Fi to deliver 'five bars' of coverage at home or in the office.

Eighty eight percent of these people in the US, and 80 percent of people in the UK would also be interested in a service from their mobile operator that would give discounted calling when the phone was connected to Wi-Fi.

It's interesting to see how similar the US and UK numbers are. These numbers are the results of two online surveys conducted in Q2 2010. The surveys were completely independent of each other and were conducted by two different companies. Yet, the level of interest in more Wi-Fi-based services is high across both geographies.

The US survey was done by MarketTools Zoomerang of 330 US smartphone owners. The UK YouGov online omnibus survey focused on the 23% of nearly 2,200 respondents in the United Kingdom with smartphones.

I encourage you to read the full survey overviews for more data and graphics available at Kineto.com.

More highlights:

In the US -

• 43 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day.
• 45 percent of those people use Wi-Fi because it provides easy access to the Internet, and 43 percent use it because it is faster than the cellular network.

In the UK -

• 50 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day;
• 40 percent say they use the Wi-Fi because it is faster for accessing the internet; 50 percent say because it is easier.

Smartphone users are embracing Wi-Fi and seem to want to be able to use it more. There's an opportunity for mobile operators to tap into this tremendous interest and encourage Wi-Fi usage to increase network offload, improve network coverage/performance and gain increasing benefits by offloading traffic to the fixed network.

Read all the rest at Kineto.com. And there's plenty more. Then, tell us what you think in the comments.

Operators Rushing to Wi-Fi

Light Reading Mobile reporter Michelle Doneghan reported last week that Deutsche Telekom is the latest operator to announce it is using Wi-Fi to offload its 3G networks.

Olivier Baujard, DT's CTO, keynoted the Open Mobile Summit in London last week and told the reporter, "the operator would like to offload 20 percent of its cellular data traffic in an outdoor environment onto WiFi hotspots, and that it is now offloading just "a few percents" of its traffic."

The article also references a Heavy Reading report published recently and authored by Gabriel Brown, "WiFi Offload for Mobile Operators," that talks about the many active Wi-Fi engagements mobile operators have undertaken as they've moved "from a position of hostile objection to passive acceptance, and now active engagement."

The next logical step will be for them to realize there are ways to get more from their Wi-Fi services and make the customer experience smarter and better. This will result in improved indoor coverage and battery performance, easier access to Internet and data services, churn reduction, competitive VoIP response where operators are still keeping subscriber minutes on Wi-Fi, and even greater increases in network capacity.

As someone who has been evangelizing Wi-Fi for years now, I say woo hoo! I thrill to the sound of mobile operators embracing the benefits of Wi-Fi. Now, let's see the leaders take it to the next logical level.

Smartphones Overtake Feature Phones in US by 2011

Just consider the title of this post: Smartphones will overtake feature phones in the US in a little more than 18 months. That is a truly impressive prediction.

Roger Entner, the SVP of Research with Nielsen's telecom practice recently posted an article explaining why the research company believes that the US market is rapidly moving to smartphones.

What makes this statistic even more impressive is that today (Q2 2010), Nielsen concedes that just 21% of US consumers have smartphones. They are projecting a 30 percentage point swing in phone ownership in the next 18 months.

Personally, I completely believe it. I have likened the jump from feature phone to smartphone in my life to the jump I made from dial-up to DSL 10+ years ago. I remember thinking "Dialup is fine, I don't really do that much on the computer." People would gush about how wornderful DSL was, but concrete benefits (beyond "it's faster") were hard to come by. But once I moved to DSL, I knew at that moment I would never go back to dial-up.

I think it's the same with smartphones. I can never go back to a feature phone. I was at a little soiree this weekend talking with a fried who works at Cisco. He never seems to be at the office.

He whipped out his iPhone and showed me why. Cisco has an internal instant messaging application with an iPhone client. He opened the client, changed his status, and suddenly he was 'working' to his contacts wtihin the company. Then he showed me the WebEx client for the iPhone. He can listen to the conference call while viewing the slides, all from his iPhone. Unless someone walked by his cube, no one would know he wasn't in the office.

The implications are staggering on many dimensions, but since this is a blog about smart Wi-Fi, I'll circle back to the need for coverage, capacity and offload. To actually work from your iPhone, a subscriber needs a strong signal for voice and good throughput for data apps like WebEx .

The cellular network is already straining with 21% of the population using smartphones. Imagine when we get to 50% penetration 18 months from now. Smart Wi-Fi is a critical technology for making the smartphone vision come true.

Informal Surveying

We have an informal survey on the home page of UMAToday.com that we use to capture some information and opinion from our visitors. It's not scientific, nor is it a well-distributed audience, but we do get pretty good responses.

For example, for the past few months, we asked visitors to answer: Do you plan to get a femtocell at home?

After tallying up several hundred votes, nearly 40% (or 39.6% to be exact) answered they never plan to get a femtocell at home, because they use Wi-Fi. Another aha moment for me. That's why we're talking about how to make Wi-Fi smarter and more beneficial to subscribers and operators. As we can see, customers are already using it to solve their coverage problems.

Ironically, another 40% (or 39.7% to be exact) answered they would get a femtocell 'as soon as they're available from my operator.' Is our audience clamoring for femtos? Certainly there's interest. In fact, 13.6% of our respondents told us they have femtocells now, but 8.1% said they'll never get a femtocell, because they don't need it.

It would be fun to dig into the responses in more detail, but these numbers give us an overall glimpse and, quite frankly, the numbers speak for themselves. Ready to vote again? We've got a new survey up today.

Smartphones are Taking Over

It's not a secret. Smartphones are EVERYWHERE! I (and others) have been singing that tune for a while.

This week, research firm NielsenWire reported "Smartphones to Overtake Feature Phones in U.S. by 2011."

According to specific statistics:

"the share of smartphones as a proportion of overall device sales has increased to 29% for phone purchasers in the last six months and 45% of respondents to a Nielsen survey indicated that their next device will be a smartphone."

Other useful stats:
- 81% of smartphone owners are satisfied with their device; only 66% of feature-phone owners are satisfied with theirs.
- 50% of smartphone users utilize their phone's Wi-Fi to satisfy the need for fast downloads; this is 10-times the percentage of feature phone owners using Wi-Fi on their phones.
- The percentage of people who use their phone for only voice communications drops from 14% among new feature phone owners to 3% of smartphone owners.

In an analysis of the research on Enterprise Mobility Today, Andy Patrizio writes:

"For the most part, Nielsen attributes the shift to smartphones to a groundswell of new smartphone devices, in particular the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones, plus an 'explosion' of new applications for them and the significant and continued decrease in the prices of those phones and carriers' data plans."

The smartphone revolution is upon us, now let's talk about the traffic demands of all those users.

Wi-Fi Stays Strong

The EU recently finished a study of telecom in the EU27 countries. The full study is published here in PDF.

One interesting statistic is the penetration of Wi-Fi into households with internet access. Within the EU27, 46% of households with internet access have Wi-Fi. As one would expect, the number actually goes up to nearly half (48%) when looking at just the EU15.

Topping the list in terms of penetration is Spain (68%) and France (67%), with Luxembourg at the top with 75% of internet enabled households using Wi-Fi.

It’s no wonder that Berg Insight projected Wi-Fi in handsets to grow at a CAGR of 71% over the next four years. By 2012, Berg projects 400 million handsets with Wi-Fi. The primary drivers are high speed interent access in the home/office, and ‘connected home’ applications.