Wi-Fi Offloading - Booming in India but Failing For AT&T?

 
2 recent articles show a very different carrier view of Wi-Fi offloading:

Gagandeep Kaur (picture) reports to Lightreading that "In line with the global trend, Indian operators are planning to use public Wi-Fi access points to offload mobile data traffic .. Aircel Ltd. recently launched 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots around India ..Bharti Airtel Ltd.  has also hooked up with O-Zone, which is in discussions with Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular Ltd. In addition, Reliance Communications Ltd. is also believed to be in discussions with Wi-Fi service providers"

Sanjeev Sarin, founder and CEO of O-Zone Networks said: "Globally, Wi-Fi has recorded unprecedented growth in the past two-and-a-half years. We believe India is going to experience similar growth in the coming years".

See "Wi-Fi Offload Set to Boom in India" - here.

A recent In-Stat report supports the above trend (see "In-Stat: Wi-Fi Hotspot Growth Continues to be Strong" - here). See also "Juniper Research: By 2015 63% of Mobile Traffic will be Offloaded to a Fixed Connection" - here and "How Much of Smartphone Traffic could be Offloaded to Wi-Fi?" - here.

Nevertheless, Stacey Higginbotham (picture) reports to GigaOm that an AT&T "executive noted that AT&T didn’t see Wi-Fi helping the nation’s No. 2 carrier offset congestion [see "AT&T: Times Square needs a Wifi Boost to cope with 3G Traffic" - here] because in most cases people don’t use Wi-Fi unless they are sitting still in a hot-spot. And apparently, there are plenty of people still wandering around watching YouTube videos"

The article notes that "It is possible to create a Wi-Fi network that allows a user to remain on the Wi-Fi network, even when moving. Other good work on this comes from chip firms where engineers are discussing standards to enable seamless hopping from hot spot to hot spot or perhaps even a handoff between a cellular and Wi-Fi network"

See "Why Isn’t Wi-Fi Better?" - here. See also "AT&T: We Need T-Mobile for the "wireless broadband revolution" - here.

Reliance Globalcom Uses DPI for App-Aware Services

 

Reliance Globalcom CTO, Kamran Sistanizadeh, tells Lightreading that "Technology, cost, and customer interest are converging to make application-aware network services a viable and popular option"

Full story here.

While most of the DPI/traffic management stories relate to consumer/home users services (usually over DSL, cable or mobile), this story is about enterprise customers. The big money. Access may be on layer2 or 3, including Ethernet access. Naturally the enterprise bigger sites (data centers) will be connected with higher speed links, while remote branches may use lower speed DSL. Applications will be “enterprise applications” - such as CRM, ERP, Citrix – known also as “mission-critical applications”. However, "recreation traffic" of employees accessing "consumer" internet applications may fall into the mix as well (yes, other people - not us - do it at work).


The idea is for the carrier to provide QoS control, as a service. This may replace enterprise-grade equipment (known as "Wan-Optimization") that can do the same, and usually installed and maintained by the enterprise’s IT staff.


It turms out that Reliance Globalcom still needs DPI to do that - "Sistanizadeh says RG's application awareness platform combines technologies such as Deep Packet Inspection with network optimization, both in software and in appliances, to create a platform for global connectivity and application optimization" 

See RG site for details on AAN - Application Aware Networking service - here