The problem is there are a lot of people who don’t realize their phones will link to their home networks — they either can’t figure out how to configure their devices’ Wi-Fi settings or they’ve disabled their Wi-Fi from the get go. Devicescape on Thursday said it has developed a new bit of software that attempts to lure those customers onto their own home networks.

Called Personal Curator, the smartphone client utilizes Devicescape’s radio management and network detection technologies, along with a machine-learning algorithm, to identify when a user is at home and a wireless network is available. If the smartphone’s Wi-Fi radio is disabled, Personal Curator will activate it and prompt the user to connect, walking them through the device configuration process.

Devicescape claims that as many as 30 percent of smartphones never connect to an available home Wi-Fi network, which would mean an enormous quantity of traffic that could easily be shunted onto a cheap broadband connection is instead heading toward the cell towers. That number seems high, but it’s not entirely out of the question. I’ve configured the Wi-Fi settings of many a friend or relative who never bothered to do it themselves.

Devicescape is selling Personal Curator to carriers, who would pre-install it on the smartphones they sell and have the biggest vested interest in coaxing customers on to as many Wi-Fi networks as possible. Devicescape estimates operators would save $631 in lifetime network data delivery costs for each subscriber that it can lure onto a home network.

Frankly, that figure is a bit absurd. It assumes that customers who don’t use their home Wi-Fi today will wander the world blithely unaware of Wi-Fi for the rest of their lives. It also assumes all smartphone users are created equal (More technically savvy users who consume more data tend to be more aware of their device’s networking capabilities).

Still, for Devicescape’s core customers, Personal Curator could be a very attractive service. The company’s whole business model is designed around the idea of providing cheap ubiquitous Wi-Fi to carriers. Through crowdsourcing, it has identified and mapped 12 million open access points around the world, and its client software automatically links to those nodes whenever they’re available.

It counts among its customers MetroPCS (now part of T-Mobile USA and mobile virtual network operators like Republic Wireless, which offer subscribers cheap unlimited data plans. Any packet those operators ship over the unlicensed airwaves is a direct cost savings. And once connected to home Wi-Fi, smartphone owners would likely use the heck out of it. A recent Sandvine report shows that 20 percent of all traffic traversing home broadband connections comes from a phone or tablet.

Devicescape has grown considerably in the last year. It now sells its products to eight carriers in North America and Europe (including U.S. Cellular and Bouygues Telecom). It has also struck deals with Intel and Microsoft to embed its software directly into the former’s Ultrabook and tablet connection manager and the latter’s WP8 software. Devicescape revealed today that it has now managing 1.5 billion Wi-Fi connections monthly, a 50 percent increase in 12 months.

Based in San Bruno, Calif., Devicescape hopes to draw more attention to itself next week at North America’s biggest mobile trade show, CTIA Wireless. It’s releasing an Android app called Magnifi CTIA that will let anyone connected to thousands of Las Vegas access points in its curated virtual network for the duration of the show.

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According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, DT is weighing a stake in Spain’s Fon, a crowdsourced Wi-Fi community in which members share with one another their home and business Wi-Fi connectivity. The Journal’s unnamed sources did not reveal the size of the potential investment, nor its timing.

Fon has been around since 2006, but its fortunes didn’t really take off until the smartphone came to prominence. Operators like BT, Softbank Mobile, Belgacom and KPN began working with Fon, tapping into its alternate network of access points to offload traffic off of 3G networks. In some cases, operators are bundling Fon Wi-Fi routers (called Foneras) with their smartphones.

If the Journal report winds up being true, this would be an interesting strategic move for DT, one that would allow it to confront the market pressures that are forcing down mobile data prices. DT runs mobile networks under the T-Mobile brand throughout Europe and the U.S., and it’s been more aggressive than most in making use of Wi-Fi (T-Mobile USA’s Bobsled app, for instance).

But if DT were able to deploy tap into the Wi-Fi networks of millions of its own customers as well as those of other Fon members (Foneros), it could start shunting substantial portions of its mobile data traffic off of its 3G and 4G networks and onto the unlicensed frequencies. Iliad’s Free Mobile has adopted just such a Wi-Fi centric strategy in France – using the Wi-Fi connections of Iliad broadband customers – and consequently its dirt-cheap voice and data plans has launched a price war among the French operators.

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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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The data usage tracker is exactly what a wireless network finder app should include as it demonstrates the benefits of offloading data from expensive cellular networks to lower priced, or free, Wi-Fi hotspots.

I took an early look at the new software on my iPhone 4S and it couldn’t be simpler to use. You just enter the amount of mobile broadband data your smartphone plan allows, as well as your costs on a per Gigabyte basis. The app also needs to know what day of the month your data plan billing cycle starts. After that, the app tracks both Wi-Fi and cellular usage, providing information on how much money you’re saving through using Wi-Fi.

The tracking information appears in an easy-to-read graph and there’s a constantly updated pie chart showing the percentage of time your iPhone or iPad is using Wi-Fi vs cellular data. The software also projects three metrics for the month, based on your usage history: Total data usage; Cellular usage; and Wi-Fi usage. The savings from using Wi-Fi is calculated through your per Gigabyte broadband cost.

Boingo’s updated app keeps the original features from its 2011 debut, so you can use it to find Wi-Fi hotspots nearby. It also includes a free VPN function for secure Wi-Fi connections. I like the addition of the data usage tracking because it can provide a true picture of data usage on both cellular and Wi-Fi networks. We know that Wi-Fi offload can help reduce cellular network demand, but according to research from Parks Associates, 50 percent of smartphone owners don’t know how much data they use each month.

Sure, you could look at your smartphone bill, but that’s after the fact — when you may have overages to pay — and it’s too late to take advantage of Wi-Fi offloading at that point. A combined data usage tool with a Wi-Fi finder provides the opportunity to proactively avoid overages or bandwidth throttling, helping to save money and give a better mobile experience at the same time.

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According to Republic, it’s the first device fully integrated with its proprietary hybrid cellular-Wi-Fi connection management software. Republic isn’t just reselling off-the-shelf devices. It’s delving deep into the Android stack to change the way the phone connects the network, prioritizing wireless LAN connections over cellular and transforming circuit-switched mobile calls to VoIP-over-Wi-Fi whenever possible.

The savings from shunting all of that traffic to Wi-Fi – rather than pay wholesale voice and data partner Sprint for network airtime – allow Republic to keep its prices low and maintain that endangered species of mobile services, the unlimited and unthrottled data plan. Republic not only leverages its customers’ home and office Wi-Fi networks, but it has signed a deal with Devicescape to access a “virtual” hotspot network of 7.8 million open access points. In the U.S., where Devicescape’s network is the densest, the Wi-Fi aggregator has seen traffic offload rates as high as 40 percent among its customers, according to Devicescape CEO Dave Fraser.

Republic has actually been using Devicescape’s technology in a limited fashion for months, loading its connection management client into the first wave of LG Optimus smartphones it shipped. But by combining Devicescape’s technology with its own hybrid calling software, Republic says can now fully realize its Wi-Fi-first strategy and is thus ready to open the flood gates to new users.

The company is still is in beta, but according to a spokesman the company’s waiting list is now more than 100,000 prospective customers long, and Republic is now letting those people onto the network “in waves.” Republic hasn’t revealed how many people it allowed into the first beta round, but it said it is now ready to scale its business. Here’s what Republic GM Brian Dally had to say in the carrier’s blog:

Members of republic are better equipped than ever before to take advantage of Wi-Fi’s fullest potential, helping to make smartphones affordable for millions more in the process. That’s important at a time when Big Cell is busy making more money at higher prices, with more restrictions and continued confusing business practices.

Republic will be the first operator to carry the water-resistant Moto Defy XT, which sports a 3.7-inch Gorilla Glass display, 1 GHz apps processor and 5 MP camera. Republic is also encouraging its existing customers to upgrade to the new device, offering Optimus users a $100 discount if they buy the Moto smartphone.

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HetNets have three major components. The first is an umbrella — or macro — network designed to provide ubiquitous mobile broadband coverage. The second is a dense network of small cells that supply enormous quantities of bandwidth in the high-traffic areas its most needed. The final component is a network intelligence that ties those networks together. According to Vestberg, the wireless industry has largely built the first and is actively deploying the second. The network intelligence is still in the works, but it won’t be long before it’s a commercial reality, Vestberg added.

There are already 1.1 billion mobile broadband subscribers globally, traversing networks comprised of millions of macro cells, Vestberg said.  Only a small subset of them are LTE subscribers today, but LTE networks already cover more than 325 million people in North America and Asia.

“We’re at a tipping point,” Vestberg said. “You build the macro networks first, but we’re soon going to have very dense networks of small cells.”

The next step is Wi-Fi, which is already being deployed as a small cell technology globally. Major operators like Japan’s KDDI, Europe’s Orange and AT&T are starting deploy dedicated high-capacity access points to offload cellular network traffic. Hotspots aren’t quite HetNet, but it’s the first step toward building a layer of small dense cells that can supply enormous capacity at low cost, Vestberg said. Ericsson has already gotten a jump on the competition by buying up metro-Wi-Fi vendor BelAir Networks, which supplies hotspot gear for AT&T and many U.S. cable operators.

Wi-Fi will soon be augmented by metrocells and microcells moving that high-bandwidth under-layer off of the unlicensed airwaves onto carriers’ own spectrum, Vestberg said. With those small cells they will be able to pack the total capacity of a macro cell into a tiny radius, and as those small cells multiply they will make once scarce mobile bandwidth plentiful.

The final component — the network intelligence to control it all — will deliver the true promise of HetNet, allowing operators to manage Wi-Fi access points as if they were any other cell and tightly integrate metro-and microcells into their network hierarchies without fear they will interfere with each other or the over-arching macro grid. That technology is already out of Ericsson’s labs and will be available in its forthcoming small cell portfolio, Vestberg said.

“I think North America will be one of the first ones to get there,” Vestberg said. “They’ve already started with Wi-Fi. They will do HetNet on top of that.”

Vestberg cautioned that HetNet is a gradual evolution of cellular topology, not a distinct network unto itself – a carrier won’t suddenly one day turn on a network of 1 million cells. The name “heterogeneous” provides a good clue on these networks will come together – Wi-Fi, home and public femtocells, pico-and micro-cells will be deployed in different stages but will eventually come together to form a larger network whole.

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Ruckus VP of corporate marketing David Callisch wouldn’t comment on whether the company was in any current acquisition discussions, but he did tell me that the attention focused on the BelAir acquisition has been nothing but good news for Ruckus. The week after Ericsson officially confirmed the BelAir (GigaOM broke the story a month earlier), Ruckus revealed a new $21.7 million in funding, bringing its total raised in 4 years to $72.7 million.

But just as important, the BelAir deal, coupled with the attention poured on Wi-Fi at Mobile World Congress last month, has raised the profile of its technology, Callisch said. Carriers now see Wi-Fi is an effective means of shunting huge quantities of smartphone, tablet and laptop data traffic onto unlicensed airwaves and more inexpensive equipment, and the big mobile infrastructure vendors have taken notice. In an email interview with GigaOM, Callisch wrote:

“BelAir was the last of the old metro Wi-Fi crowd that has struggled to make ends meet.  But they are shrewd and understand the carrier Wi-Fi market better than most. The only problem is that they are approaching a fundamentally new carrier architecture, with the introduction of small cells, with dated technology and little to no value-add with respect to Wi-Fi.  Ericsson’s purchase of BelAir is clearly a harbinger and a sign that carriers have changed their tune and want to now integrate Wi-Fi as a standard radio access method into their mobile networks. That’s just good news for everyone.”

Good for everyone, but particularly for Ruckus. According to Callisch, where BelAir merely succeeded, Ruckus has excelled, making it the best-positioned vendor in the market to capitalize on the smartphone Wi-Fi offload craze.

Staking claims across the Wi-Fi market

Ruckus already has the world’s single-largest mobile data offload network to its credit: KDDI is deploying a 120,000-access point network throughout Japan, which amounts to a one hotspot for every 266 of its customers. In the U.K., Ruckus is building a dense metropolitan network throughout London – replacing an existing BelAir network – just ahead of the 2012 Olympics. In the U.S., Ruckus is working with the cable operators to build their hotspot networks. and last week it  announced a deal with the city of San Jose, Calif., to blanket its downtown with access points.

Ruckus also has a sizable enterprise WLAN business. Though it’s nowhere near the size of market leader Cisco Systems, in the fourth quarter it shipped 132,000 business access points, according to Gartner, putting in the third place just behind Aruba Networks.

While Ruckus’ strength is in Wi-Fi it’s also attempting to build a business in the converged small cell market, following in BelAir’s footsteps. At Mobile World Congress, it took the covers off its new LTE-Wi-Fi small cell, which combines an unlicensed access point and a 4G radio into a single unit connecting back to the operator’s mobile network through a mesh of Wi-Fi links.

But with LTE, Ruckus is stepping well outside of its comfort zone. It has a lot of experience building dense high-powered metro and indoor Wi-Fi networks, but cellular base stations are highly specialized products produced by just a handful of global vendors. If Ruckus has ambitions of building more than souped-up outdoor femtocells, then it will almost certainly need the help of a major mobile infrastructure vendor. That was BelAir’s strategy as well, which ultimately led to it being acquired.

Who would be interested in Ruckus?

Two vendors that may very well be sniffing around Ruckus are Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks. Both have announced aggressive small cell strategies integrating Wi-Fi directly into their future cellular network architectures. But neither company builds its own Wi-Fi gear, relying instead on partners to supply the actual hotspot infrastructure.

Ruckus won’t talk about the possibility acquisition. Instead Callisch said that Ruckus believes it has a bright future as a stand-alone company. While the last round of funding gives the vendor a nice boost, he added, Ruckus won’t be seeking any more private investment. Instead, the company’s next planned step is an IPO, which Callisch said Ruckus would file for by the end of the year.

We’ll see if Ruckus actually gets that far. It’s looking more and more like Wi-Fi will be a critical element to future mobile broadband networks, and Ruckus, like BelAir before it, holds a lot of the key expertise and technology necessary to get those networks built.

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Wi-Fi offload has been a big trend in the last two years as operators try to defuse the data demands of their customers by shunting packets over to in-home, corporate or campus Wi-Fi networks. However, cellular operators have also been reluctant to give up control and the potential revenue associated with sending traffic across their cellular networks. With BelAir, which makes Wi-Fi access points already in use for city-wide Wi-Fi networks for wireline cable providers Comcast and Cablevision, Ericsson can give operators control and more capacity.

BelAir also has IP related to its equipment that makes it less obtrusive and can also create a larger Wi-Fi mesh network that more closely resembles a carrier’s cellular network. On a BelAir network it’s possible to configure it so moving from one hot spot to another is seamless and doesn’t require another sign on. This is great for consumers, who can use Wi-Fi on trains for example, but it’s also great for operators, because they can track a subscriber through the Wi-Fi network. As Kevin pointed out three weeks ago:

From Ericsson’s perspective BelAir’s technology may be an easy way for it to break into metro Wi-Fi without cannibalizing its core product line. By slotting its own cellular radios into BelAir access points, it can sell operators both Wi-Fi and cellular upgrades in a single package.

This is a good deal for both Ericsson and BelAir, and a resounding success for the idea of Wi-Fi offload. It seems crazy that only four years ago Verizon wasn’t allowing Wi-Fi radios on its handsets.

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Alcatel-Lucent’s one-two punch

Alcatel-Lucent is adding Wi-Fi to its new lightRadio small cell architecture, acknowledging that the small cell networks of the future won’t just be composed of miniature versions of the big macro cells looming from towers. They will also make use of cheap Wi-Fi access points using free unlicensed spectrum.

Rather than come out with its own line of dedicated access points, Alcatel-Lucent is incorporating Wi-Fi radios directly into lightRadio’s unique Cube design. The idea is for operators to deploy hybrid Wi-Fi and cellular networks as part of the same network, leaning on Wi-Fi to offload heavy volumes of Internet-bound traffic while using traditional 2G, 3G and 4G radios to provide the operator’s core voice and data connectivity. Alcatel-Lucent is incorporating the tech, which it simply calls lightRadio Wi-Fi, into the femtocell and metrocell configurations of lightRadio’s modular Cube architecture.

LightRadio is still a year or two away from commercial deployments, but in the interim Alcatel-Lucent is working with outside Wi-Fi vendors — so far unnamed — to incorporate their access points into its existing 3G and 4G networks. The Franco-American vendor’s service gateway will be the glue holding those components together, managing the disparate Wi-Fi and cellular connections as part of a single network. As customers pass between its Wi-Fi and cellular pools, the gateway recognizes and tracks them, eliminating the need for their devices to constantly log back into either data network.

Ericsson tying the knot with BelAir

Ericsson, the world’s largest wireless infrastructure supplier, aims to break into Wi-Fi through acquisition. Last month, I reported that Ericsson is in the process of buying metro-Wi-Fi vendor BelAir Networks, and at MWC we may witness the official announcement.

BelAir will give Ericsson instant access to not only an outdoor high-performance Wi-Fi product line that can scale to hundreds of thousands of hotspots but also a hybrid small cell technology similar to lightRadio Wi-Fi.

While waiting for the final acquisition details to emerge, BelAir is continuing to build on its technology. Ahead of MWC, it announced enhancements to its GigXone platform to optimize it for its new role in the mobile data network. In particular, it is building buffering technologies to cut down on jitter and latency and video streams, filters that block out interference from nearby cellular radios, and beamforming techniques designed to boost its access points range and capacity.

Smaller vendors get in on the action

Cellular technology pioneer InterDigital has turned its attention to the next generation of Wi-Fi, exploring how the technology can be expanded into emerging unlicensed bands like the white spaces between TV broadcasts (that is, if Congress actually allows white spaces for unlicensed use). InterDigital is debuting a technology at MWC called Integrated Dynamic Spectrum Management (pdf), which detects and harvests unused spectrum in the white space bands and bonds them to regular Wi-Fi signals, creating an ultra-high-capacity connection between the device and the hotspot.

This week Stoke introduced a new “clientless” network gateway, which allows Wi-Fi network to identify subscribers by their operators and automatically connect authorized users, without requiring any specialized software on the device. That may sound like a small thing, but one of the biggest obstacles carriers face in embracing Wi-Fi is that there is no easy way to sort out which devices have permission to access their access points and which don’t.

Today operators get around that obstacle by requiring customers to log into their access points — which many subscribers aren’t willing to do — or by installing clients on their customers’ handsets that automatically recognize authorized hotspots and seamlessly link to them. The holy grail for carrier-grade Wi-Fi, though, is for hotspots to recognize devices by their SIM cards, just like cellular networks.

Are we on the verge of a mobile Wi-Fi revolution?

It depends on whom you ask. Cisco Systems is very bullish on overall mobile data growth, but in the latest Visual Networking Index report, released on Tuesday, it heavily downplays the role of Wi-Fi in future networks. Cisco estimated that 11 percent of all mobile data traffic was offloaded onto Wi-Fi networks and private femtocells in 2011, which is significant, considering only a handful of global operators embraced Wi-Fi. But what is shocking is Cisco’s projecting that only 22 percent of that traffic will traverse Wi-Fi connections in 2016.

Cisco tends to be conservative with its numbers — for the past several years it has had to retroactively revise its data traffic estimates upward — but it seems to be particularly cautious on its Wi-Fi projections, assuming only lackluster support from operators for Wi-Fi. It is easy to get that impression today here in the U.S., since carriers like Verizon Wireless tend to dismiss Wi-Fi and even the operators that back the technology like AT&T haven’t exactly gone gangbusters with deployments.

But in other regions of the world operators are diving in whole hog. Japan’s KDDI is building a network of 100,000 access points, while French mobile upstart Free Mobile is churning up the competitive market in France with a cheap wireless service built on a 5 million residential hotspot backbone.

A lot of vendor activity around a new technology doesn’t necessarily reflect a strong operator demand (look at WiMAX), but in this case infrastructure suppliers probably aren’t generating meaningless buzz: They have little incentive to. If operators weren’t interested in Wi-Fi, vendors like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent wouldn’t get anywhere near the technology, because they stand to make little money from it. When it comes to selling network capacity, cellular technologies are a far more profitable enterprise.

My guess is that operators are applying enormous pressure on their vendors to integrate Wi-Fi in their networks and to do it quick. That is why MWC this year may look more like a Wi-Fi networking event than a cellular networking one.

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As Om detailed in his in-depth profile of Free Mobile, Free isn’t operating like any typical carrier. It’s using its network of high-speed DSL connections to create a communal wireless network of sorts, splitting home Wi-Fi between public and private channels and then using that public portion to create the mother of all hotspot networks. The density of cities like Paris practically guarantee that any given mobile customer will be in range of one of these nano cells, allowing it offload mobile data very cheaply. As it incorporates femtocells into its set-top boxes, Free is doing the same for voice and SMS.

Filling in the gaps between Wi-Fi, Free has launched a 42 Mbps HSPA+ network. To prevent customers from tying up too much cellular capacity, Free has implemented a rather liberal 3 GB-per-month cap, but as long as you remain within Wi-Fi’s warm embrace, you’re data usage faces no restrictions.

Though France’s operators like many of their international peers make use of Wi-Fi, they don’t have a 5-million-access-point advantage of Free. For instance, France Telecom’s hotspot network consists of only 30,000 access points. Consequently their pricing responses haven’t even gotten close to matching Free’s plans.

France Telecom’s Orange has launched two plans for its Sosh SIM-card service (i.e. bring your own phone) that both undercut Free’s €20 plans, but neither delivers anything near unlimited. A €9.90 plan includes unlimited SMS, but only 120 voice minutes and bills data at a half-Euro per 20 minutes (though the plan will soon included unlimited Facebook and Twitter use). A €14.60 plans adds 1 GB of data usage to the plan, while a €24.90 stacks on unlimited calling. That’s essentially the same service that Free offers with only a third of the data bucket, and that’s before accounting for Free’s hotspot network, which adds a hefty data multiplier. Just for good measure, Free has also launched a basic service including 60 minutes of calling and 60 MBs of data for a mere €2 Euros a month.

Free isn’t just gunning for new customers by challenging the established carriers with aggressive pricing. Free is attempting to overturn the old order completely by offering prices the traditional carriers have no hopes of matching unless they fundamentally alter the way they build their networks and provision mobile service. Those operators seem to be treating Free as a bottom-of-the-market nuisance, and are challenging it only in the bring-your-own-SIM space that Free is currently targeting. That may be a big mistake. Not for the first time in France’s history, there’s a revolution in the making that could overturn the established order and see its effects ripple throughout the world – this one just happens to be focused on wireless.

Image of Eugene Delacroix painting courtesy of the Louvre

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