Page 31 - Mobile World Daily - Day 2

DEVICESCAPE | CONNECTIVITY FIRST
John Gordon, CTO, Devicescape
Connectivity First:
Mapping The
Landscape
The connectivity landscape is complex
and crowded, with huge variation
between indoor and outdoor
locations. As a real-world walk-
through shows, end users need help
to navigate their way through it.
How do you paint the Connectivity
Landscape? For decades mobile
operators have relied on coverage
maps, which necessarily simplify a complex
reality into an easily digestible picture,
presented as evidence of available
connectivity. Their usage has been sustained
by the rollout of every new generation of
network technology, with islands of 3G
superimposed on saturated 2G maps, and the
process repeated with the introduction of LTE.
Unfortunately, from day one, these maps
aggravated those end users whose experience
of connectivity contradicted the pictures
they’d been given. Intended to market
network strengths, coverage maps
simultaneously exposed network weaknesses.
The biggest problem with these maps, of
course, is that they ignore an entire
dimension of the user’s real world. The
connectivity landscape they depict is flat and
featureless. In life, that landscape is crammed
with buildings that create havoc for
smartphone users, and the mobile operators
trying to keep them connected. These maps
hide literally millions of uncomfortable truths
beneath their blanket cellular coverage.
Provision of indoor coverage is the most
daunting connectivity challenge facing mobile
operators today. Every building footprint
represents an area on the coverage map that
is fortified against cellular penetration. Worse, forced to navigate a click-through portal to
the total indoor coverage requirement for any
city is every one of those areas replicated for
each floor of the building it represents. A five- walk through the store showed that there was
storey building requires coverage that is five
times’ its ground level footprint.
This is a total coverage area that, for any
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city, is substantially larger than the city itself!
Look at Metropolitan New York—it contains
more than a million buildings.
Current generation mobile networks
provide excellent bandwidth and, at least in
urban areas, good outdoor coverage. But they
are all constrained when it comes to
replicating that quality of coverage indoors,
particularly inside large commercial buildings
such as shopping malls, large retail stores,
and hospitals. As users move indoors, they
often find themselves transported from the
wonders of LTE back to the bad old days of
2G and early 3G.
But what does this experience actually look
like to an end user going about their day?
In a recent experiment I walked a loop
around the inside of a large, newly built retail
outlet here in the U.S. while monitoring the
LTE signal quality. Immediately upon
entering, the LTE signal began to rapidly
degrade. By the time I reached the middle of
the building, the phone dropped LTE
completely, reverting to a weak 3G
connection that delivered barely any data
throughput at all.
Worse, the handset didn’t attempt to switch
back to LTE until I was outside the store
again, leaving me with low speed data for the
remainder of the visit. For an industry striving
to increase dependence on wireless data
connectivity, this represents a poor effort. I
was effectively disconnected, and my mobile
operator was doing nothing to help me.
The retailer in question provides in-store
Wi-Fi, free to customers once they have been
gain access. Monitoring the Wi-Fi signal
strength of the connection during the same
good coverage throughout. What’s more, the
Wi-Fi network provided an average
throughput of 5 Mbps for the duration of my
visit—comparable to the LTE performance I
measured in the area just outside the store.
Devicescape Network Quality
90.00%
67.50%
Quality 45.00%
22.50% Entering store,
0.00% switching to Wi-Fi
Time
Of course, the Wi-Fi signal strength
dropped off quickly as I left. But I didn’t need
it outside the building; I had a first-rate
connection. Outside and on the move cellular
does the unbeatable job it was designed to do.
Indoors, Wi-Fi is simply more effective and
more abundant more of the time. This is the
reality that end users face every day.
The connectivity landscape is becoming
just as tightly packed with Wi-Fi as the actual
landscape is with buildings. Wi-Fi is
increasingly prevalent in homes and offices,
but these deployments represent just a
fraction of the total coverage reach it
provides. The most significant growth has
been that of amenity Wi-Fi, offered by
businesses as a free service to their
customers. It has altered the connectivity
landscape in a truly fundamental way.
Because it is deployed to attract and retain
smartphone users, amenity Wi-Fi fills out the
connectivity landscape in precisely the places
where users spend their time. Here in the U.S.,
free amenity Wi-Fi is available in 99% of
airports, 95% of hotels, 71% of stadiums and
convention centres, 72% of museums, 68% of
cafes and bars, and 69% of fast food outlets.
It’s a huge resource.
Wi-Fi Quality
LTE Quality
Devicescape Quality
Leaving store, LTE
reconnects
So when T-Mobile USA CEO John Legere
announced his Wi-Fi Un-leashed program last
September, and likened it to adding “millions
of towers” to his network, he wasn’t wrong.
When the true connectivity landscape is
painted, filling the picture with Wi-Fi as well as
cellular, it becomes clear that indoor coverage,
like outdoor coverage, is actually in plentiful
supply. So the best way for operators to meet
the challenge of providing indoor connectivity
is to bridge the gap between their excellent
outdoor coverage and the excellent indoor
coverage that already exists thanks to Wi-Fi
deployments. It’s all just connectivity, after all.
In the store where I measured LTE and Wi-
Fi performance, a consistent quality of
connection was available both indoors and
out. The only problem was that I had to
manage the process of transition myself.
Successful mobile operators will be those
that start thinking about Connectivity First;
those that connect the user wherever they are
in the landscape, using the best technology
available in the moment. By doing so they will
not only be in a position to give their
customers a more realistic map of the
connectivity landscape, they will actually be
helping them to navigate their way through it.
Tuesday 3rd March PAGE 31