Posted: 5/2003
Back-Office: WLAN's 'Ollie'
By Chris Luzine
Carriers have two very attractive opportunities in the Wi-Fi market space: to offer hotspot access and roaming to their subscribers and to provide managed WLAN services to their enterprise customers.
However, carriers have their work cut out for them. In the public hotspot market that means developing hotspot footprints, establishing roaming agreements and ensuring that they have the authentication and billing integration to support the business.
The key challenge in the managed WLAN services market will be to create a profitable service offering that delivers superior customer service. The opportunities are significant enough to warrant this work, and many service providers are ideally placed to leverage their existing systems, infrastructure and customer relationships to reap the Wi-Fi rewards.
Establishing a strong authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) system gives service providers a solid base of functionality that can be leveraged for optimum revenue generation and cost savings, and helps position them to take advantage of 802.11 opportunities as they unfold.
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It should have a strong policy engine, to allow for the creation, delivery and billing for a variety of services. These might include subscription or pay-as-you-go access, specific geographic roaming options and content options.
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During the authentication process, it should provide the ability to access external systems to validate credit cards, prepaid accounts and debit cards.
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It should allow for the control of user sessions, terminating them when prepaid funds are exhausted or when abusive behavior such as hacking is detected.
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It should offer advanced accounting functionality, including:
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Aggregating usage data from various sources (wireline, wireless and 802.11) into comprehensive usage records.
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Formatting and streaming usage records to billing systems, according to a defined schedule.
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It should be carrier-grade, i.e. it must be able to scale to support increasing subscriber numbers and different business models. This is important so that service providers can create a flexible system that can accommodate changing business needs and scale as their business grows with minimal up-front capital investment.
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If the offering is a managed service, it should extend self-care capabilities such as user administration to the enterprise, affording the enterprise a degree of control over the service while further reducing carrier operations and costs.
Chris Luzine is product manager for Bridgewater Systems, a provider of dynamic IP and data service fulfillment and assurance solutions. *An "ollie," catching air without grabbing the skateboard, is the basis of most skateboarding tricks.
What Wi-Fi Users Want?
A national study of U.S. households recently conducted by Wirthlin Worldwide in collaboration with PDS Consulting and IP Action, highlights opportunities for marketing Wi-Fi hotspot services. In the study, Wi-Fi hotspot service was described as enabling a user to obtain high-speed wireless access to the Internet at a variety of indoor and outdoor locations, with Wi-Fi coverage allowing such access on most streets in built-up areas of towns or cities. Among the key findings:
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Wi-Fi services priced between $10 and $30 per month will attract between 7 percent and 16 percent of U.S. households, or as many as 17 million subscribers assuming one subscriber per household and 106 million households (2002 U.S. Census figures).
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The optimal price point to maximize revenue is $20 per month, which will generate $3.6 billion per year from 15 million subscribers.
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Business and professional applications are of more interest than entertainment-related services. More than 60 percent of likely subscribers are interested in Wi-Fi service to access their enterprise network, exchange email with large file attachments, obtain information with multimedia content, and for general high speed Internet access, while approximately 40 percent would use to the service to download music.
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Most of the likely subscribers, more than 50 percent, see themselves using a laptop PC or enhanced multimedia cellular phone at Wi-Fi access sites, while much fewer (28 percent) would use a PDA.
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Most likely subscribers have cell phones (69 percent) and approximately half use home dial-up access to the Internet (51 percent). Fewer are equipped now with a notebook or laptop PC (35 percent) or PDA (19 percent).
