Cable and broadband providers in Europe have leapt on the concept of ‘homespots’, where subscribers open up access on their personal Wi-Fi routers to create clouds of access to complement hotspots. Now the US is following suit, with Comcast planning to expand its Wi-Fi network via its own Xfinity users’ gear.
Comcast users will contribute to coverage and capacity by allowing their Wi-Fi gateway to transmit a public signal that can be accessed by any fellow Xfinity customer. This will accelerate the expansion of the cableco’s Wi-Fi system, in which it has been investing heavily since it decided to rely on WLans to add a wireless element to its services and move towards a quad play. Although Comcast has an MVNO deal with Verizon, it turned back on previous plans to build its own cellular network, and sold its spectrum to its 4G partner.
The major US cablecos have also expanded their Wi-Fi reach by engaging in a huge roaming deal, allowing their users to access each other’s hotspots. If Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Cox and BrightHouse join Comcast in supporting homespots, the roaming could be extended to them too.
Comcast will announce its homespot initiative today, emulating those run in Europe by the likes of Deutsche Telekom, British Telecom and France’s Free. These may rely on the provider’s own Wi-Fi gateways, with part of the capacity opened up for public use, or on a third party partner such as FON. In Comcast’s model, subscribers using the firm’s latest wireless gateway will broadcast an additional Xfinity Wi-Fi signal for common usage. This option is turned on by default, though people can opt out of the service.
This signal does not interfere with, or degrade the speed, of the main broadband service. “Our broadband customers will continue to get the service that they are paying for,” Tom Nagel, SVP of business development, told CNet. “That was extremely important to us in designing this product.”
He added that customers can also use the public signal to offer access to their visitors, without giving out passwords for their secure area. However, the visitors would need to be Xfinity subscribers too as the system does not currently offer the facility for non-users to log on (unlike some European offerings, which have a paid-for option for non-customers).
Comcast started testing the new service last year in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and in and around Washington DC. Currently, more than 100,000 Xfinity subscribers are using the new Wi-Fi access points. Together with its other CableWiFi Alliance partners, Comcast will announce today that it has added tens of thousands of new access points to the network, making a total of more than 150,000 indoor and outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots in more than a dozen major cities across the country. The network has tripled in size since it was first unveiled last year and is now one of the largest in the US.
Homespots will become an increasingly important part of operators’ toolkit in expanding mobile data capacity, especially as ‘ like femtocells ‘ they are backhauled by the consumer’s own broadband line and may even be incorporated in paid-for equipment, greatly reducing the cost of build-out.
Homespots add a QoS layer to insulate the home Wi-Fi performance from services offered to a roaming customer. The US cable sector potentially has access to more than 60 million homespots, while there are a further 50 million or so in Europe, also controlled by cablecos ‘ an international roaming deal could be in the works. Of course that may take a while to develop into a usable force, and it might be that homespots are held back only for the benefit of the cablecos’ customers for the immediate future. But it creates serious pressure on telcos to come up with a plan to have national and global roaming on Wi-Fi.
AT&T, one of the early movers in major league hotspot deployment after it acquired Wayport, has yet to implement a homespot approach using its home-based gateways, but it is sure to be watching the activities of European cellcos and broadband providers with interest. Many work with FON, which has access to 7 million homespots via deals with telcos such as British Telecom, which has 4.5m Wi-Fi routers supporting open access via FON’s application. Other partners include SFR in France, Zon in Portugal, MTS in Russia, Softbank in Japan, Belgacom in Belgium, KPN in the Netherlands and Deutsche Telekom in Germany.
Over time, these homespot roaming deals will become as important to Wi-Fi offload and onload as the hotspot aggregation arrangements, like AT&T’s recently announced alliance with Boingo. Cablecos are often taking the lead, especially in the US, but the other operators will soon be under pressure to follow.