In the run-up to the IBC broadcasting trade show last week, we spoke to Alcatel-Lucent’s Nick Cadwgan, the company’s marketing lead for Carrier WiFi. He revealed that he has a customer in the US with two million WiFi end points on a single network, as well as 250,000 access points.
Of course he could not mention the client’s name, but Comcast is the only firm with that many end points in the US, having recently announced it had deployed 4.6m WiFi hotspots. The leading US cablecos see public WiFi as a way to add wireless elements to their service bundles, extending coverage and capacity to such an extent that their reliance on cellular MVNOs is minimized, increasing their customer control and their cost efficiency. The Cable WiFi alliance even allows its members’ customers to roam over a combined network which is forecast to reach about 10m locations in 2015.
Comcast and some others are extending coverage cheaply and aggressively by deploying homespots (home gateways with a second SSID left open for passers-by to use) as well as conventional hotspots. These are backhauled by the consumer’s broadband line, of course, a pattern which could enable telcos like AT&T to join in the game. AT&T, an early mover in carrier WiFi when it acquired Wayport, has not yet converted any of its 16.5m broadband homes into homespots.
There are risks with homespots, in terms of customer acceptance, security, overall performance and so on, and so some cablecos and telcos are holding back, or relying on third party partners, notably FON. For instance, Time Warner Cable’s principal architect, Roger Stanford, told a recent LightReading event that community WiFi was not on his product roadmap (though, of course, that may change if TWC is acquired by Comcast). The smaller cableco has about 46,000 hotspots in the US and taps into CableWiFi. And while it may not be using dual-SSID gateways as homespots, it is interested in them for smart home services, to replace the separate device it currently instals for those.
ALU is helping its premier customer, and 50 others, according to Cadwgan, to build out their WiFi offering so that it works all the time, every time, by adding things like customer self-activation, customer care and authentication – all of which, for the carrier, also equate to instant network scalability. With 56% of WiFi sessions coming from smartphones and tablets, one of the big tasks is to provision all those apps.
Cadwgan noted that there are 3.7bn WiFi connectible devices out there today, and 80% of tablets are connected by WiFi-only. Despite Verizon’s strong quarter shipping LTE-enabled tablets, he believes “people that have a smartphone know when they are connected to WiFi network and they know when they are connected to LTE. It’s a choice and this statistic will remain at 80% no matter how many devices ship with LTE modems in them.”
In addition, in the US, smartphones are in reach of a WiFi network for 70% of the time on average, which will improve as coverage is extended, especially via the homespots. There are 6.3m hotspots in action today and by 2017 some 80% of all mobile data will go through WiFi, by ALU calculations.
Of course, this is partly because homespots with second SSIDs will be attached to about half of the 600m-plus home gateways out there, and this will suddenly switch on, between now and 2017, an avalanche of WiFi capacity. This will make WiFi even more ubiquitous. Hotspots are more planned than homespots and placement less haphazard, and by some estimates one professionally planne hotspot can do the work of 20 home gateways. But even so, turning on some 300m homespots would be like adding 15m hotspots in the suburbs of every country in the world – a 250% overnight increase over the capacity we have today.
Not all this activity will be driven by cablecos, despite their obvious need for their own wireless network. ALU also noted the changing attitude of mobile operators, moving from outright hostility to WiFi, to embracing it as a useful place to offload unwanted data, to a full network asset and potential element of a HetNet.
“We are seeing a change in the attitude towards WiFi from all operators. In the past there was a feeling that WiFi and the entire network must be owned and controlled by one operator, the same one that offered a service like a video service. There has been a journey of acceptance and discovery by cellcos that fixed line attached WiFi is okay to use,” said Cadwgan.
He outlined the process by which he says ALU is able to ease this journey of acceptance. Creating a VPN tunnel from a remote WiFi access point back to its where it authenticates its credentials, rather than simply giving out AP passwords all over the network, gives the kind of reassurance that cellcos demand, for instance.
“There is a genuine convergence between mobile and fixed operators. They are now just operators and we have found that the fixed side of a converged operator is usually the one that has been quietly installing WiFi,” Cadwgan continued. “Mobile network operators still want to deploy WiFi themselves too, and they are, but can you imagine the CEO of Verizon saying in public that the spectrum that it paid so much for is not the solution to future connectivity problems? The shareholders would have a field day with them. No, and that’s why carrier WiFi which is owned by cellcos is being installed rapidly but very secretly.”
“MNOs think that trusted WiFi is better (everything behind their encryption wall) but they are realizing that the real job right now is to capture the footprint, and if that means using untrusted WiFi then so be it.”
The next stage will be ‘WiFi 3.0’ or mobile ubiquity, where WiFi is an available option from virtually everywhere. But it needs the addition of ANDSF to manage policy and 802.11i for authentication (which defines how keys are held and derived for encrypting content) and the SIM held version of Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP-SIM) for session key distribution. There is also a requirement to facilitate roaming and also for layer 2 communication in tunneling.
But surely companies like Comcast don’t want to invest in such a complex security and authentication environment? “It is true we are merging internet authentication with cellular authentication, but you have to remember that many of these fixed line operators have a basic subscription data management issue anyway. They welcome this type of approach. Mergers have left them in just as bad shape as cellular networks in that they are running multiple subscriber databases and they want the merged and managed,” the ALU executive continued. “This is a battleground to become nomadic, not purely cellular” – one which will lead to many new WiFi-first services which fall back to cellular only for voice (though it’s interesting that many networks are also supporting WiFi voice as well).
Cadwgan claims the lead for ALU at two points in the network – what the 3GPP calls Trusted Wireless Access Gateway (TWAG), which talks to authentication servers directly on behalf of trusted WiFi networks (the ALU 7750 SR WLAN Gateway, which claims a two-year lead on rivals); and the Trusted Wireless Access Proxy, which handles Radius and Diameter calls using IPsec tunneling to untrusted parts of the WiFi network.
He claimed: “Listen, this stuff is advanced. We can take a handset’s cellular authentication and find its internet credentials and vice-versa, even if the device has not got the right credentials. Also we can verify a tablet even though it has no SIM card. We can make the policy control really dynamic and changes things at different times of day or for different apps. We can set whatever policy any operator wants, it can be never go over cellular or always go over cellular, and everything in between.”
He added: “We are working for one major MSO in the US, and one of the leading MNOs there, and operators in China and in the Netherlands. We have 50-plus networks and this architecture was only launched in 2012.”
So expect Comcast to reveal a robust WiFi network in mid-2015, with accurate usage reporting and seamless authentication, all of which could support a strong WiFi-first service and hit the US MNOs in record time – which would suggest a counter-offensive from them before the end of next year, harnessing WiFi and HetNet.