SpeedIdeation

Me too. Wonder if we are at a tipping point with the iPhone 6 now supporting, which again may bring US carriers to support the feature and more following, ending up with potentially WiFi-only. Any thoughts on this?

@sorenhelsted Still waiting for a new type of mobile carrier blanketing the world with cheap mobile hotspots...and my flying car.

Flying car was hot in the 50s - I remember seeing series about that in the TV when my son was young ;-)

How do you think we can provide cheap mobile hotspots? Crowdsourcing? Government? Other?

@sorenhelsted what could be the financial gain for carriers to offer cheap hotspots? Looks like moving customers outside their control...

@sorincos or keeping customers who would otherwise move to another technology. If you see this as an innovators dilemma and WiFi as the disruptor.

In the US consumers are inside (free or not) Wi-Fi areas about 80% of the time. There are two new 'Wi-Fi First' (or only) MVNOs doing the Wi-Fi only thing right now. One is called Scratch.

@sorenhelsted dunno whether I can think about carriers as "innovators" at all :) My bad.

I think that WiFi coverage 80% of the time sounds right - at home, in the office, in cafe's/restaurants. And in busses and trains when you commute. Maybe even in your car (but of course thats powered off mobile data)

Sorin - maybe not, and then they will be history :-)

There are ways to make Wi-Fi completely secure for example with the Hotspot 2.0 standard. Such standards are in fact so secure that they're even approved by the 3GPP (mobile standards organisation).

I was thinking that with secure WiFi, maybe it would be possible to crowdsource coverage of WiFi - when you are in cities you often have access to loads of private hot spots that could be used to get better coverage indoor

Yep, things like that in fact already exist. Devicescape is for example a company that does that mostly in the US. They've crowd-sourced something like 15 million Wi-Fi hotspots in America and put them all into a network.

I seem to remember that the Danish operator TDCs cable company is doing something of that sort as well, i.e. that each user's hot spot is used for others as well - maybe TDC has an opportunity here to couple those WiFi hot spots to their service

UPC Cablecom offers same free shared hotspots in Switzerland, Netherland, Poland, Ireland... but how's coverage?

Does iPass provide both data and speech or just data?

Yep, it's a tough one. I think if the hotspots are open then it's up to the hotspot provider to secure it. But I must admit I'm not a legal expert in that area :-)

as enduser you can choose to use a hotspot only when it implements certain contracts. As provider there's no way to get out of the liability zone.

what if all users are authenticated, and you log access and data, then you know who sent what?

@ubiqinno the challenge is, logging all that while also respecting privacy rights...

How about coverage of WiFi? Indoor in e.g. a conference area it is quite doable to put in sufficient WiFi coverage, but how about outdoor?

Outdoor is harder but there are certainly companies doing this successfully. Towerstream US is doing high-quality outdoor Wi-Fi in New York City - probably the hardest place on Earth to do Wi-Fi. But they're doing it :-)

What technology do they use? I have heard about municipalities that want to use street lights with build-in WiFi access points, it that a winning solution?

Towerstream has worked for years on refining their solution together with Ruckus. Streetlight Wi-Fi would work. But the service needs to be easy to get on - that's the main thing.

You are right about easy access. Just like I have 4 WiFi access points in my house, they all have the same SSID and password so i dont know which one I am actually on and as I move around the house there is smooth handover

can WiFi hotspots handle bypassers without hammering the service? Didn't think protocols were built for that but I'm not knowledgeable about it.

I was thinking about Quality of Service may be an issue. Sound quality of cell voice might be very bad but you would like to get your emergency calls through.

@sorenhelsted what's voice over wifi offering beyond the ages old voice over IP?

Not sure about the details but I see it as the same and the idea of making a 3G/GSM call that can move to VoIP and back

I often have problems with data rates on mobile data - even with good coverage

@ubiqinno indeed, mobile data prices can kill one's plans quite fast. Mitigation being to build stuff FOR that.

I was actually thinking about data rates/speed not cost