At the end of this blog, we answer the following frequently asked questions in addition to other topics:

Q1. What is WiFi?

Q2. What is WiFi 6?

Are Mobile Network Operators Adequately Monetising Their Services?

As a mobile network operator (MNO), your company supplies essential WiFi service to business owners. This service is the lifeblood of any company without which entire divisions and processes would stall. But are you profiting as much as you can off of the network access that you are supplying? The likely answer is: No!

How Can You As a Mobile Network Operator Better Monetise Your Services?

Here are three ways that you can better monetize the services that you offer:

Network Location Awareness (NLA)

NLA services collect user device configuration and location information and notify applications when changes occur. A Global Positioning System (GPS) is a common example of an NLA. This information is valuable to other companies as it provides critical feedback as to where—and how—end users are using their applications. Equipped with that knowledge, you’re able to effectively target them with specific advertisements. For example, NLA data might show that every time a customer is at a certain coffee shop, she immediately searches a music app. If that’s the case, operators can sell targeted advertisements.

Advertising on the Capital Portal Network

A capital portal network is commonly used for large public WiFi settings where large amounts of people connect to a network at once. This is prime advertising space for companies that want to provide location-based, real-time advertising services for end-users.

Intelligent Offloading

A business owner needs to supply fast and efficient WiFi connectivity to end-users. But this is impossible if the mobile network they use is congested due to a heavy amount of end-users. Intelligent offloading services can help alleviate clogged networks, which can reduce connection costs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is WiFi?

Put simply, Wifi is a technology that uses radio waves to create a wireless network through which devices like mobile phones, computers, printers etc., connect to the internet. A wireless router is needed to establish a Wifi hotspot that people in its vicinity may avail to get access to internet services. You’re sure to have encountered such a Wifi hotspot in houses, offices, restaurants, etc.

To get a little more technical, Wifi works by enabling a Wireless Local Area Network or WLAN, that allows for devices connected to it to exchange signals with the internet via a router. The frequencies of these signals are either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bandwidths. These frequencies are much higher than those transmitted to or by radios, mobile phones, and televisions since Wifi signals need to carry significantly greater amounts of data. The networking standards are variants of 802.11, of which there are several (802.11a, 802.11b, 801.11g, etc.).

Q2. What is WiFi 6?

WiFi stands for Wireless Fidelity and is also a common name for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). WiFi 6 is the newest and fastest version of the WiFi 802.11 wireless local area network specification standard. IEEE 802.11ax or commonly marketed as WiFi 6 by the industry body WiFi-Alliance is a major advancement over its previous generation that offers multiple devices to run concurrently on one network without compromising on the data speeds and response times.

The 802.11ax standard was approved by the IEEE on 9th February 2021 is designed to operate between 1 and 7.125 GHz, including the widely used 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. To better understand, WiFi or Wireless Fidelity devices usually translate radio waves into binary code using a technique called QAM ie Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. The older generations of WiFi are capable of 256 QAM ie it could send 8 bits of binary data in a single transmission whereas WiFi 6 is capable of 1024 QAM ie 10 bits of binary data in a single transmission.

This significant increase helps WiFi 6 devices to provide 30% faster speeds than its predecessors. The previous WiFi standards like 802.11/a/g/n/ac used OFDM which meant all of the subcarriers or tones were allocated to a single device at any instance of time. WiFi 5 introduced Multi-user MIMO enabling multiple users on the wireless medium at the same time thereby adding multiple users across different streams with each device using all of the subcarriers.

With WiFi 6, OFDMA can now portion up the individual sub-carriers or tones and these can be allocated to a number of devices. Apart from greater bandwidths, higher data speeds snd lower latencies, WiFi 6 also offers better spectrum utilisation using orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), Multi-user MIMO support, better power consumption and enhanced security protocols.