Technological advancements are accelerating, and the proliferation of digital channels is transforming the connectivity and mobility landscape. With Wi-Fi becoming the new age priority network partner operators too are evolving their businesses to include Wi-Fi in their roadmap. Users are forging their way ahead to grab an opportunity to access services through Wi-Fi. Amidst the buzz around Wi-Fi, the most differentiating factor lies in the customer experience offered by the service providers across various segments.
With the Public Wi-Fi hotspots increasing at a multi-fold rate, offering free and paid public Wi-Fi services is the most common and widely adopted Wi-Fi model. It offers a hassle free voucher or OTP based Wi-Fi access via Captive portal or app. Moreover, operators also get an advantage of offering branding and promotional spaces on rent, generating new revenue opportunity. Public Wi-Fi is also inherent part of Smart City trend not just for user access but also as network layer over which smart services can be provided for citizens, governments and businesses.
Carrier Wi-Fi and monetization continues to de-strain and optimize the mobile networks by seamlessly offloading traffic and offering unique monetizing prospects by offering location and profile specific contextual ads, promotions and notifications, app based seamless connectivity and business Intelligence with reporting and analytics. It uses traffic patterns, usage & device behaviour, activities over Wi-Fi.
Nowadays, enterprises across segments including hospitality, transportation, education, retail, smart cities, healthcare etc. find potential in Wi-Fi as means to get closer to customers by offering customized and personalized Access services. It has in-built detect, connect, engage and analyse model to enhance customer engagement and revenue opportunities. To facilitate this, service providers are now transforming from service provisioning to service enablers. This entails a comprehensive Enterprise Wi-Fi solution capability to offer real-time customer Wi-Fi usage analysis, business applications integration support, customizable analytical reports, contextual ad campaigns and monetization business cases across to enable high quality Wi-Fi services for enterprise customers.
Another talked about trend in the recent times is offering voice services over Wi-Fi. As an access enabling technology Wi-Fi holds great potential to entice positive disruption in the telecom space. Wi-Fi calling or Voice over Wi-Fi (Vo-Wi-Fi) enables operators to overcome the challenges of declining voice revenues, poor indoor coverage, congested cellular spectrum, infrastructure CapEx etc. and offering hassle free HD quality voice experience and seamless voice transfer between cellular and Wi-Fi.
With the recent regulations and standards announced for Wi-Fi access in roaming, this model is paving the way for carrier Wi-Fi. Carriers can transform user experience by avoiding bill shock and make mobile connectivity infinitely easier like never before in roaming scenarios. Wi-Fi global roaming enables operators to offer seamless national and international Wi-Fi roaming to their subscribers and thus harness the opportunity for additional roaming usage and revenues
The offering always need an advanced Connected Wi-Fi Analytics solution that can enable CSPs to make data-driven decisions for intelligent network planning and discover monetization opportunities by taking advantage of valuable and actionable real-time data insights from Wi-Fi network infrastructure. This helps to bridge the gap between what is offered and what is in demand.
The future of next-gen mobility is a reality with the right strategy been empowered. Sterlite Tech software is one of the leading providers of Wi-Fi Service Management Platform (SMP) with successful case references worldwide. The SMP helps to transform the mobility experience and address the new age monetization demand for CSPs and Enterprises beyond Public Wi-Fi and offload with innovative and advanced solutions – Enterprise Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Calling, Wi-Fi Global Roaming and Wi-Fi Analytics.