PCCA Journal|4
th
Quarter 2014
21
President and CEO Evan Kaplan said.
“Most of the devices we use are Wi-Fi
only and even on the most advanced 4G
handsets, 78 percent of data goes over
Wi-Fi. Simply put, it’s the network of
choice for consumers and soon they’ll be
able to roam this alternative network of
millions of hotspots.”
Wi-Fi is also on the move; becom-
ing available on 60 percent of planes
and 11 percent of trains by 2018. This
compares to only 16 percent of planes
and 3 percent of trains equipped with
Wi-Fi in 2014. Community “homespot”
public Wi-Fi hotspots will see the most
explosive growth, rising from just under
40 million in 2014 to more than 325 mil-
lion in 2018.
“The growth in community hotspots
is taking public Wi-Fi from the cities
to the suburbs,” said Peter White, co-
founder, Maravedis Rethink. “The fixed
line operators with superfast broadband
in the ground are converting residential
customers to community hotspot provid-
ers at the rate of 1 per second. For many
years, all the talk around mobility has
been on 3G/4G and a handful of mobile
operators. Our data shows that in the
coming years it’s Wi-Fi that will steal the
limelight as consumers’ thirst for data
goes beyond anything that cellular can
deliver, and as business owners see the
value Wi-Fi brings to helping them dif-
ferentiate and innovate.”
The research showed that Wi-Fi is
changing the power structures of the
telecommunications industry. Fifty
percent of all commercial hotspots are
controlled by brands whose core busi-
ness isn’t telecommunications. Just a
few years ago there were only a handful
of Wi-Fi suppliers; now there are mil-
lions. As opposed to the highly regulated
cellular world, Wi-Fi is organic, emer-
gent, and empowering; it’s not regulated
and it’s easy for anyone to deploy. As a
result, we are witnessing a power shift
from traditional telcos to business own-
ers, such as cafes, hoteliers, and retailers
who are all getting in on the Wi-Fi game.
“A messy and fragmented global Wi-Fi
network is emerging; the challenge is
that it needs to be easy for consumers to
access and simple for providers to mone-
tize. This is where we’ll see the platform
players like Facebook and Google come
to the party. They have the ability to
help this new breed of Wi-Fi provider get
paid in meaningful currencies—namely
cash, advertising, or user data,” Kaplan
said. “Just look back ten years or so,
many business were under-utilizing their
online assets before the emergence of
Google AdSense; now many are making
significant revenues from it.”
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