More Information

Interested in Advertising? (click here)

Zaga Novakovic Now an independent consultant, Zaga previously worked with Ericsson for 6 years as Senior Product Manager for 3G and Business Development Manager for packet data in which she has engaged in forecasting, product development, 3G business strategy development, fraud prevention and developed business in the areas of WLAN and AAA. She has worked closely with operators all over the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Zaga is also a published author in various industry periodicals including Telecommunications International, Telecommunications the Americas, and USA Today.

Mobile in Minute papers

Advertising based free Wi-Fi./The Googlization of Wi-Fi

The explosive trend in the United States for municipal wi-fi, also known as Muni-WiFi has unleased unexpected and thought provoking concepts on how to fund "free" Wi-Fi. Currently there are many cities in the U.S. and some internationally that have either already installed their "free" or "partially free" wi-fi networks across cities. In the U.S. those cities include San Francisco, San Jose, Concord, Santa Clara - California, Aurora, Chicago, Springfield- Illinois and even Southaven Mississippi. Internationally included are Singapore, Manchester, London and many others.

Two very important developments within municipal wi-fi in particular are advertisement paid free wi-fi and location wi-fi, which potentially could and will work together. The first concept is that free wi-fi can be subsidized or paid for by allowing for advertisments. In that scenario, those using the free wi-fi service would view a number of ads in return for free service. Under that scenario, a higher-service level version of access could be offered, as has been done in some municipal deployments where those wanting a higher quality of service pay approximately $20 per month. The networks will be mesh networks that utilize the concept of using 1 frequency from one access point to another to backhaul the traffic. Mesh networks use 5 MHz for the mesh and 2.5 GHz for the user access. Bellaire Networks uses this model, while Proxim uses the same frequency for both the backhaul and user. They have the most efficient algorithm which uses the fewest number of hops.

Google is the forerunner in the area of advertising based wi-fi,. They are a natural pioneer in this area because currently 99% of their revenue is advertising driven. To take that to the next level and be able to provide free wi-fi on an ad-based revenue model could be the next step in a marketing revolution. To get there, they will need to overcome many issues such as network management and especially painful, privacy concerns.

One point to make clear is that even an ad-based free wi-fi model will take 2 to 3 years to smooth out and commercialize properly so that the glitches can be ironed out. Municipal Wi-Fi will have many issues to overcome such as privacy, public safety applications (in exchange for free locations throughout a city), network management, ease of use, adoption rates, etc.

For more information see:

• Public Access WLAN Case Studies 2007

Copied by MobileIN.com with permission from Mind Commerce
Copyright © 2007 Mind Commerce- All Rights Reserved

Also see:

Public Access WLAN Industry

More information at: http://www.mobilein.com/WLAN/