The Homespot revolution that we have seen coming out of cable is about to hit the
US, with the largest cable operator there Comcast launching itsWiFi onslaught at The Cable show in Washington this week.
Comcast did not specify how many Homespots that it will create and this is a very alien concept in the US. The idea, initially is to create a second SSID and allocate some part of the WiFi bandwidth to it, and use this ID like a Hotspot. This can additionally be offered for free from one household as long as that house hold offers some of their home gateway bandwidth to other passing Comcast customers. Judging from other installations in Europe this would be viable in at least two thirds of Comcast Internet homes.
Later this bandwidth can become the ‘go to’ network for delivering video to portable devices, whether they are in the home or to passersby, where they are Comcast customers. By partnering with other cable WiFi networks such as Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks and Cablevision, and even potentially Verizon, all the cable companies could potentially gang up on AT&T.
This ‘CableWiFi’ alliance in the US between five of the country’s largest cable companies has already led to a nationwide Wi-Fi roaming network, giving subscribers free access to 50,000 hotspots which they collectively own. Currently, these MSOs together have 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City and the surrounding Tri-State area, as well as Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, and Philadelphia. The companies have plans to collaborate to set up Wi-Fi hotspots in remaining major US cities, avoiding overlap, meeting the competitive threat from the big Telcos Verizon and AT&T. But that’s before the introduction of these Homespots, which will make this more an issue of catch up for AT&T.
Given that Comcast has 19.8 million High Speed Internet customers it could potentially turn that into a single cloud of available public WiFi. If you also added the internet lines from Time Warner Cable (11.1 million) and Cablevision (2.7 million) and even their partner in video delivery Verizon (8.9 million, roughly 5.6 million of which are FiOS fiber connections), you have a total of 22.5 million public WiFi connections just among these ‘ none quite so powerful as an outdoor Hotpsot, but collectively more powerful than all the hotspots that exist now in the US and that might get installed in the next three to five years.
We’re not sure that Cablevision and Verizon would want to work together on WiFi, but Cablevision is joined at the hip with Comcast and Time Warner Cable on WiFi already, while Verizon has partnered the others for video service delivery. Other cable companies might join in, but we doubt that AT&T would be invited to the party.
So far you may only have Comcast customers getting broadband wherever they are, but if you add to that mobile phone customers either those from Comcast, or from any mobile operators, where the operator pays money to the owners of this Wifi cloud, for offload roaming, specifically for video delivery, then you have a club to beat AT&T with. Up until now AT&T will have been considered the WiFi leader in the US, but overnight it could become immediately impoverished in WiFi terms.
WiFi offload is all about the seamless movement between the cellular system and WiFi. Of course right now individuals can subscribe to both a cellular service and a WiFi service, whether that is hotspots based or through their own broadband provider, and switch between them. A private individual would be unable to use an Extensible Authentication Protocol based SIM, and would need that from a cellular operator, and also be unable to install Hotspot 2.0 or ANDSF protocols on their WiFi. But the cellular and WiFi operators can do this, and thereafter, whoever sets the policy (that depends upon which of these protocols is used and who ‘owns’ the customer) can decide under what conditions to flip in and out of cellular and WiFi, and use this to drive down phone and tablet data delivery costs.
You might imagine that eventually this will all settle down rather like internet peering did back in the 90s, with large WiFi holders swapping traffic with equanimity, but we think this will be used to give an advantage to specific mobile phone contracts, and this could be used to attack the leadership that AT&T has in cellular, whether this is done with or without the help of Verizon, or through a cable MVNO or both.
All that Comcast said this week was that it is beginning to give its Xfinity Internet customers an additional “xfinitywifi” signal in their home that is completely separate and distinct from the family’s private and secure home WiFi signal. This is offered at no additional cost to Xfinity Internet residential customers, and will create additional WiFi hotspots that will enable friends, relatives, visitors and other Xfinity Internet customers instant, easy access to fast and reliable WiFi.’
We have already estimated that a 50 million SSID European and a 60 SSID million US cable cloud could be formed in under a year purely by cable companies, tied together for seamless co-operation with roaming agreements, which will form the basis of a massive WiFi Cloud and that this would change the economics of global mobile video.
Comcast began what is described as ‘neighborhood hotspot’ trials last year in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia and the Greater Washington, DC metro area with initially 100,000 Xfinity internet subscribers sharing Wifi access.
Comcast’s WiFi strategy has two strands and it recently added tens of thousands of Xfinity WiFi access points within the CableWiFi Alliance, and now claims 150,000 indoor and outdoor WiFi hotspots in a dozen major cities.
Comcast has brought this new development to light in a barrage of announcements at the Cable show, alongside faster WiFi devices and its second generation Xfinity offering and a list of new broadband services including home automation and free security apps. It has also added 3,800 WiFi hotspots in the District of Columbia this week.
Comcast used the show to unveil a new version of its cloud-based X1 platform Xfinity dubbed X2, to be available later in 2013. The new platform will integrate live and on-demand TV, web content, home control and a growing number of apps in one user interface. New capabilities shown include a new customizable dashboard, user-personalization, integrated multiplatform content and social integration including new viewer ratings from interactive services Rotten Tomatoes and Zeebox.
It also added a couple of features on the existing platform the first being ‘Send to TV” so you can throw a web page directly to an X1 set-top. Also customers will soon be able to access TV-optimized sites from a variety of third-party partners in an expanding app marketplace.
Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts aid, ‘The next generation of the X1 Platform will be even smarter and faster, providing more personalized recommendations on multiple screens, for a customized TV product that consumers can access on a TV, smartphone, tablet or PC. It is designed to integrate live and On Demand TV, web content, home control and a growing number of apps in one user interface. ‘
Comcast also announced it has boosted speeds nationwide for two of its most popular Xfinity Internet speed plans, Blast! and Extreme 50. Specifically, the Blast! tier increased from 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps downstream and from 4 Mbps to 10 Mbps upstream. Extreme 50 went from 50 Mbps to 105 Mbps downstream and from 15 Mbps to 20 Mbps upstream.
Intel also announced at the show that it provides one of the chips for the new Wireless Gateway, its Intel Puma 6 DOCSIS silicon and said that the device is made by Cisco. In the past Broadcom has provided the WiFi and set top SoC to Xfinity devices, particularly those made by Pace, which used its Full band Capture capability, MoCA and WiFi and well as a transcoding element. The new gateway is its first with MoCA 2.0 and can bond 16 DOCSIS channels. Broadcom came out with MoCA 2 earlier this year, so this may still be a Broadcom chip.