Today Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks sit side by side, but they hardly work together. When you’re in the presence of an authorized hotspot your device will log in, leaving the cellular connection behind. As you wander away from the access point, your Wi-Fi connection gets weaker to the point of uselessness until your device finally disconnects and forces its way back onto the cellular grid. It’s hardly an ideal or seamless experience.

These new traffic steering technologies, however, make what were once two distinct networks act as one, selecting the optimal connection at any given moment. So if you suddenly wander into a congested hotspot, the network knows to keep you connected to your 3G cell, instead of forcing you onto a useless Wi-Fi link. As the congestion levels change on those two networks, the user’s device is shifted between them in real time.

This kind of traffic steering will be a key component of heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, which will make use of different radio technologies to create multi-layered and tremendously high-capacity mobile networks. But according to Petri Hautakangas, Nokia Siemens North American head of technology, it’s just a first step. Networks and devices will eventually be able to balance traffic between networks, as well as ship data simultaneously across multiple radio connections, he said.

For Ericsson, the news also represents the full integration of BelAir Networks’ Wi-Fi hotspot technology into its cellular architecture after acquiring the Canadian vendor last year. Nokia Siemens doesn’t make its own Wi-Fi gear but it partners with Wi-Fi access point and hotspot makers like Ruckus Wireless.

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It’s only 30 stations so the project is still well short of its goal, but AT&T and T-Mobile customers should start noticing their phones maintaining their connections as they descend into the depths of Midtown Manhattan. In addition, Boingo is also using the system to expand its hotspot networks underground. Transit said the stations are located in Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center and Columbus Circle. (You can see a list of the specific stops here.)

Transit has installed a distributed antenna system, or DAS, which is neutral-hosted cellular technology. That means that, unlike with traditional tower radio infrastructure, multiple carriers can use the same equipment to reach their customers. They just install base station gear in a hidey-hole somewhere in the MTA’s underground maze, and Transit’s antennas spread their signals to nearby stations.

T-Mobile and AT&T are the anchor tenants of the project, but Verizon Wireless and Sprint said they are negotiating agreements with Transit and the MTA to use the network as well. Transit is targeting 2016 to complete its DAS installation throughout NYC.

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But ACN announced a deal with Devicescape on Tuesday that could make its rather plain-Jane mobile service plans much more attractive in the future. Flash will tap into Devicescape’s virtual network of 11 million hotspots. It’s the same approach that both Republic Wireless and U.S. Cellular to offload traffic off of 3G and 4G networks.

Currently Flash resells minutes, texts and data from both Verizon Wireless and Sprint, but its pricing is still higher than many MVNOs and budget carriers in the market. For instance it offers an unlimited plan, including voice, data and domestic and international SMS, on Sprint’s network for $60 a month, but if you tap into Sprint’s LTE network the cost goes up to $70 a month. Most MVNOs and even prepaid operators like MetroPCS far undercut those rates. Fellow multilevel marketing MVNO Solavei sells an unlimited plan for $50 a month.

But if ACN follows the lead of other carriers that have begun leaning on Wi-Fi to take over the data connection’s heavy lifting, Flash could find plenty more wiggle room in pricing. Republic is experimenting with a $19 monthly unlimited plan, defraying its costs by relying on customers’ home and business Wi-Fi connections, as well as Devicescape’s virtual network, to handle the bulk of its voice calling and data usage. Free Mobile is doing the same in France with its own 4-million node Wi-Fi network.

Wi-Fi image courtesy of Flickr user suttonhoo

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In two separate but reciprocal agreements, DoCoMo’s network of 55,000 hotspots will all become virtual nodes in Boingo’s Wi-Fi network. Before the deal, Boingo customers had access to only 5,000 hotspots in Japan. In turn, NTT DoCoMo customers will be able to roam onto Boingo’s global network, which now boasts 600,000 hotspots.

Boingo’s presence has expanded considerably in the last two years. It has announced similar roaming and offload deals with Korean carriers KT and LG U+ which together host 67,000 access points.

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Those access points will be used to shunt traffic off of Telkom’s cellular data networks, greatly increasing their overall capacity. Cisco said that these access points will be Passpoint certified, which means customers will be able to automatically connect and authenticate to them whenever they’re in range.

That network is big, but it’s actually the second network of its size in Asia. Last year Japan’s KDDI deployed a 100,000-node network using Ruckus Wireless gear. Though the networks are the same size, Telkom has a lot more ground to cover. It has 22.8 million residential customers (using either wireline or fixed wireless access technologies) and 107 million wireless customers spread across the sprawling archipelago nation. That means it will have a Wi-Fi node for every 1,000 mobile customers.

KDDI is a smaller operator, with about 40 million customers, meaning there’s an access point for about 400 customers. But compared to other global Wi-Fi deployments, both operators are being very aggressive. In the U.S., AT&T has been the most pro-Wi-Fi mobile carrier, and it has a hotspot for every 4000 subscribers. In some cases, though, AT&T has deployed multiple access points in hotspot clusters so its density is higher.

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Like its cable compatriot Time Warner, Comcast isn’t just latching onto the established managed Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, restaurants and shops. It’s building an extensive outdoor hot zone network as well, exposing its access points to the elements to capture high-traffic pedestrian zones and public gathering spots.

Until now Comcast has been mainly concentrating on the eastern seaboard where it has built extensive networks using Ericsson BelAir Networks equipment in and around Boston; Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va. But now it has cast its eye on the left coast. Comcast has also struck up roaming pacts with Time Warner and Cablevision that will eventually allow them to create a unified national hotspot network, though so far its only been implemented in New York City.

Comcast’s California rollout doesn’t appear to be quite as dense as its mid-Atlantic deployment, but it covers a lot of markets. A complete list of cities and towns is at the end of this post, but you can also see detailed coverage maps at the Xfinity website.

Comcast’s Wi-Fi hotspots are detailed in red

As with its east coast network, Comcast is offering Wi-Fi access to its residential broadband customers for free. For non-Comcast subscribers, the cable operator is selling access by the hour, day and week. The SSID for the network “XfinityWiFi” and can be accessed from any laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Apart from the Bay Area the new Comcast network is in the following markets: Aptos, Atwater, Buellton, Cameron Park, Carmel, Chico, Chowchilla, Colusa, Corcoran, Davis, Diamond Springs, Dinuba, El Dorado Hills, ElkGrove, Fairfield, Folsom, Fresno, Galt, Grass Valley, Hanford, Kerman, Lathrop, Lemoore, Lodi,Lompoc, Los Banos, Madera, Manteca, Marysville, Mendota, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Murphys, Nevada City, Newman, Oakdale, Oroville, Parlier, Patterson, Placerville, Rancho Cordova, Reedley, Roseville, Sacramento, Salinas, San Andreas, Sanger, Santa Maria, Selma, Solvang, Sonora, Soquel, Stockton, Tracy, Tulare, Twain Harte, Vacaville, Vallejo, Visalia, Willows and Yuba City.

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Tapping into Wi-Fi to offload smartphone 3G and 4G traffic isn’t new. Carriers such as AT&T have built big networks of public hotspots for just that purpose. But since all of those hotspots are either owned or managed by the carriers and their partners, there’s a limit to far they can scale. Devicescape calls its network “virtual” because it doesn’t actually own or manage any of the hotspots it connects to. Instead it relies on its freely available smartphone and PC software to crowdsource information on more than hundred million open access points globally.

Currently, Devicescape has more than 8.6 million access points in its virtual network, of which 7.8 million are available in the US. In comparison, AT&T has 30,000. What’s more Devicescape is constantly expanding its number of hotspots. The clients loaded into customers’ phones are constantly scanning the airwaves for more open Wi-Fi, so the more U.S. Cellular subscribers use the service, the more access points they’ll eventually have available to them.

In addition to U.S .Cellular, Devicescape is working with virtual operator Republic Wireless, MetroPCS and Intel in the US, and with Bouygues in France. For U.S. Cellular, the network will be of particular use in its primary metro market Chicago. Not only does the city have a dense concentration of open Wi-Fi, but it has the densest concentration of US Cellular customers competing for time on its 3G network. U.S. Cellular has launched LTE in other parts of its footprint, but it doesn’t yet have the spectrum to offer 4G in the windy city.

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Before you get too excited there is one big caveat: you are not allowed to tether your smartphone or use it as a mobile hotspot. T-Mobile’s not crazy. It doesn’t want to open up its network to the full brunt of the PC-and tablet-driven internet. But whatever you can do on your smartphone — short of sharing your connection — is fair game: Netflix, YouTube, massive file sharing, you name it. According to T-Mobile, it won’t throttle or cap.

Director of Marketing Harry Thomas said T-Mobile is revisiting the unlimited plan simply because that’s what its customers want. The issue wasn’t megabyte stinginess –- T-Mobile already offers the biggest buckets of smartphone data for the cheapest prices in the U.S. with the exception of Sprint. Instead, T-Mobile is targeting the customer that frets over his monthly data consumption -– the one that worries about whether he can still download a video or stream music without breaching his data cap, Thomas said.

“We’re going where our customers are leading us, and unlimited is where they’re telling us to go,” Thomas said.

The unlimited plans will come in two flavors depending on whether you paid for your phone up front or took advantage of one of T-Mo’s subsidized devices. Value plan — or unsubsidized –- customers pay $20 a month, while classic –- subsidized –- customers pay $30. The value plan is pretty much the cheapest data plan in wireless data among the nationwide operators. Sprint’s unlimited plans cost $30 and are still restricted primarily to its 3G CDMA network, while T-Mobile offers much faster HSPA+ speeds in 229 markets. At AT&T, $20 will get you a measly 300 MB, while Verizon Wireless has stopped selling individual data plans entirely.

T-Mobile is keeping its metered plans in place for customers that do want to use their phone’s hotspot capabilities. Ironically, that means you would pay more for a 5-GB plan ($25 for value, $35 for classic) than you would for an unlimited one.

A lot of people in this industry have opined — myself among them — that the unlimited data plan is endangered species, an untenable business model in a world where mobile capacity is so constrained. But Thomas said T-Mobile believes that unlimited is still a viable strategy. It’s not a limited promotion or some loss-leading pricing gimmick to stem its customer losses, he said: T-Mobile expects to make money off these plans.

That’s a bold statement coming from T-Mobile considering just how much data its customers consume. The carrier recently revealed that its average smartphone customer eats up 760 MB a month, far higher than the industry average. On its 42-Mbps dual-carrier HSPA+ network that number increases to a whopping 1.3 GB a month.

If Thomas is right about unlimited being a viable business for T-Mobile, then that raises a very interesting question: If unlimited can work for T-Mobile, why can’t it work it for AT&T and Verizon?

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284; Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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Instead of distributing a single broadband connection to multiple devices via Wi-Fi, Connectify is aggregating multiple connections into a single, fat wireless pipe. The obvious use case is to combine Wi-Fi and 4G, but Connectify says it can stack any kind of data link ranging from an Ethernet connection to a dial-up modem. The new software is called Dispatch, but it’s still under development. Connectify is taking to Kickstarter to help fund the project and is offering early contributors access to its first beta release and free use of its app when it launches commercially.

Why would you want to combine multiple broadband connections? Well, if you eat up gobs of bandwidth through file sharing, the aggregated connections would come in handy, but a more typical example revolves around connection management. Connectify’s software allows you to prioritize different links. If you were at an airport or coffee shop with spotty Wi-Fi but didn’t want to max out your 4G hotspot’s monthly data allotment, you could configure Dispatch to tap a free Wi-Fi network’s cheap bandwidth first and only resort to the 4G hotspot when Wi-Fi falters.

Connectify plans to offer the software as a stand-alone PC product as well as incorporate it into its Hotspot software, which would allow the PC to act as both connection aggregator and broadband distributor – though more Wi-Fi links would necessitate the use of additional Wi-Fi cards or USB modems. Connectify also plans to offer up an API for developers who want to use the technology in their own apps.

Though Connectify’s service is a consumer product, mobile carriers are working on something similar. Eventually smartphones, tablets and PCs will be able to connect to multiple networks simultaneously as well as connect to multiple nodes on the same network. For instance InterDigital has developed connection management software that would maintain separate parallel connections to Wi-Fi and cellular networks, sending different types of data over each pipe depending on their destination. Traffic bound for the network core, such as carrier’s VoIP service or signaling data, would use a 4G connection, while lower-priority Internet bound traffic could be routed over the Wi-Fi.

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You may have already seen some of Cloud Nine’s works in a few major airports. When logging into a hotspot, instead of getting the usual registration and payment screen, a terms-of-use page pops up offering to show you a video or ads in exchange for 30 minutes or more of free Wi-Fi access. AT&T is launching a similar service at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport this September.

Boingo had been testing the sponsored Wi-Fi model working with Google Offers to provide ad-supported Wi-Fi in New York City subways and with American Express to do the same at a handful or airports. According to Christian Gunning, Boingo VP of corporate communications, sponsored Wi-Fi has been in increasing demand especially as Boingo expands beyond airports and convention centers into more consumer-centric locations such as malls, restaurants and stadiums where the expectations are much higher that Wi-Fi should be gratis. Gunning said in an email interview:

“… [W]e’ve historically outsourced this capability. As our consumer segment growth continued (and along with it the need for more sponsored access), it became evident that having this capability in-house would be beneficial.  Cloud Nine Media has built a strong business specializing in the delivery of sponsored Wi-Fi. They have a proprietary sponsorship platform that gives us the ability to deliver these sponsorships ourselves, as well as generate valuable data for sponsors. Bringing advertising/sponsorship expertise in-house puts us in a much stronger position to fulfill corporate goals.”

Boingo runs a global hotspot of network of 500,000 hotspots, though don’t expect every hotspot it owns or manages to suddenly stop taking credit cards. Many of its restaurant and café venue partners already offer Wi-Fi free to the public as a means of attracting customers – Boingo just signed a deal with Wendy’s to connect thousands of fast food restaurants. But the biggest part of Boingo’s business comes from subscriptions, which allows laptop, smartphone and mobile device customers to instantly connect to its global hotspot network for a monthly fee.

It’s likely Boingo will run the “free” service and the subscription service in parallel, generating revenue from non-subscribers through advertising while charging its customers monthly fees to access the same hotspot. The benefit of the subscription model, though, is that it treats all of Boingo’s disparate hotspots as a single network. Subscribers with the proper software on their devices not only bypass advertising, they don’t have register at every hotspot they encounter.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, though Boingo may be more forthcoming on the financial details at its earnings call scheduled Wednesday afternoon.

Airport image courtesy of Flickr user Michal Osmenda; Wi-Fi image courtesy of Flickr user suttonhoo

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