Cell Phone Users Have a Soft Spot for Hot Spots

April 10, 2014

By Ernest Worthman…

Roughly 45 percent of global wireless traffic was offloaded to Wi-Fi hotspots or femtocells.in 2013, according to Cisco Systems, and this data will continue to increase each year until offloaded traffic surpasses that which stays on the mobile network.

Worthman

By 2017, Wi-Fi will account for 48 percent of the global IP traffic and cellular will account for only about 10 percent, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), which is a combination of video, social networking and advanced collaboration applications that forecasts the growth of IP networks worldwide.

Private Wi-Fi hotspots are also playing in important role in expanding network capacity, especially in Europe. European operators have convinced customers to share their home access points with one another, creating a “homespot” network to leverage capacity that might otherwise be wasted when homes are empty. In the United States, Comcast is adopting the homespot model, asking customers who use its Wi-Fi routers to share access with one another.

Interestingly, the faster speeds and greater capacity offered by LTE have not decreased customer Wi-Fi use, even though LTE can handle many of the videos and large files that drove 3G customers to Wi-Fi connections. According to SK Telecom, 3G users consume an average of 86.2 megabytes per month over Wi-Fi networks, while LTE users consume almost twice that amount, 146.3 megabytes per month over Wi-Fi.

A similar trend was reported by Devicescape, which manages a network of curated Wi-Fi hotspots for carrier customers. Devicescape found that on its network 4G users consume double the amount of data over Wi-Fi networks that 3G users consume, which works out to 2,018 megabytes per month for 4G versus 1,010 megabytes per month for 3G.

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Ernest Worthman is the editor of AGL Small Cell magazine, an AGL Media Group publication