Wi-Fi

Wireless operators have a lot of options for improving in-building or venue coverage, including macrocell, picocell, WiFi and distributed antenna system (DAS) technologies to name a few. But today, capacity is becoming the real issue, and here, a lot of operators are working on creative ways to offload onto a Wi-Fi network to alleviate the strain on the 3G system. In fact, a lot of the operators around the world are looking at WiFi offload as a business case. Operators in Brazil, for example, are looking to WiFi offload strategies to handle all of the soccer-driven usage expected from the 2014 World Cup. Otherwise, they simply don’t have the infrastructure on the 3G side to support the infusion of millions of people into [...]

Looks like unlimited data is becoming a thing of the past for wireless subscribers, at least in the U.S.  Blame the exploding demand for mobile data. After all, today’s wireless subscribers are armed with dual-core, 1 GHz smartphones that are as powerful as desktop PCs were a few years ago. And those phones are accessing a dizzying array of online data services delivered over wireless networks that can rival cable in terms of speed. Now the explosion. Cisco researchers taking a closer look at mobile data trends expect the average user will consume 7 GB per month by 2014, which is 5.4x greater than today. Another eye opening prediction is the 39-fold increase in annual [...]

WiFi offload, which is the ability to move data traffic from one network to another — on the spot or delayed, is proving to be an effective strategy for reducing network congestion for many wireless operators today. With on the spot WiFi offload, mobile network data is immediately transferred onto the WiFi network. On the spot WiFi offload provides instant access to the Internet, on demand, but doesn’t take any network performance criteria into account before processing the transaction. Delayed WiFi offload delays transactions based on a preset time or criteria to reduce the load on the network as it takes into account network performance characteristics such as capacity, location, and data prioritization. WiFi offload [...]