Up until fairly recently, Wi-Fi was about in-home PC connectivity. But a few factors – the popularity of smartphones, the advent of tablets, overburdened cellular networks, among others – have come together to make Wi-Fi ubiquitous and its use in public settings commonplace.

And the trend is only strengthening; In-Stat says that 800 million smartphones alone will ship in 2013 (and a few billion Wi-Fi equipped devices), and Cisco’s 2013 Global Mobile VNI report found that mobile offload will increase from 33 percent (429 petabytes/month) of mobile data traffic in 2012 to 46 percent (9.6 exabytes/month) in 2017.

In our exuberance to monetize the Wi-Fi industry, here are the three big ways where network operators or owners of service provider Wi-Fi deployments can mess it up (Note: the author’s employer, Cisco, makes and sells a variety of Wi-Fi equipment, but the content of this article applies equally to competing products as well).

Make it hard to access Wi-Fi

We have reached the point where we simply expect Wi-Fi to be readily available in airports, hotels and public places. And yet we all know the shock of discovering when the opposite is true. In most places, paying for Wi-Fi not only takes money out of consumers’ pockets, it’s also a hassle and a time suck. But keeping it free to consumers does not, in fact, destroy the business model. It creates others. The fact is people are enticed by free Wi-Fi.

Consider the tale of the cable MSO (I can’t name names yet) that added free Wi-Fi to its broadband package. The result: 15-18 percent churn reduction over 18 months. Now factor in what can happen with the addition of Wi-Fi network intelligence. Pairing free Wi-Fi with location-based analytics improves the business experience and opens up new revenue streams in crowded locations such as hotels and malls.

Say our friend Harry walks into IKEA. Call it a loyalty app, call it a mobile butler, call it a personal concierge – it gets awakened on his phone, by the intelligent network, and alerts him: “Want some free Wi-Fi, Harry, compliments of IKEA?” Harry agrees and is now on the IKEA Wi-Fi network, and chances are high that he’s looking for something IKEA can help him find or discover.

Now doing the opposite – making Wi-Fi difficult to use, with registration and pay schemes – drains time, battery power and more importantly enthusiasm. Anecdotally, a mobile operator recently mentioned to us that even a simple “terms and conditions” pop-up on their network causes a 50 percent drop-off rate, with users abandoning the activity they were planning on engaging in based on inconvenience.  And to the contrary, at a recent professional football game, another operator offered an unadvertised version of Wi-Fi which then generated more than a terabyte of traffic – simply because it was free and easy-to-use.

Abuse the user’s trust

Trying to knowingly or unknowingly capture private data about people, via their gadgets, always backfires in the long run. How happy and willing would you be to regularly frequent a Wi-Fi network if you knew you were going to be bombarded with myriad privacy-invading apps? Not so much.

The popularity of Groupon and other discount sites, however, confirms that if consumers crave anything it’s deals. The challenge then is offering them without compromising security and violating privacy. To effectively balance these factors, let your customers drive your Wi-Fi service. Recognizing the difference between user information and device information is essential to establishing trust with the customer. Rather than mining personal user data, Wi-Fi and location-based services can be used to improve the user experience through their intelligence and by allowing the user to opt in only with the info they want.

Our friend Harry is now on a Las Vegas vacation and could use a little assistance finding his way around the Bellagio resorts. Wi-Fi can help Harry find the ATM machines when GPS can’t reach him indoors or offer him discounted tickets for a late-night show. By enhancing Harry’s experience through network intelligence – offering him information he wants and, crucially, none that he doesn’t – loyalty is built and trust remains intact. The less intrusive the experience, the safer the end-user feels which is critical for encouraging network usage.

Spamming them with unwanted advances

So now you’ve earned Harry’s trust, but that doesn’t mean Harry wants six different offers from you within the span of 10 minutes. That means not pushing your coupon pop-up to Harry until you see one of two things: 1) he appears to be idle, and/or 2) an opportunity to send something contextually relevant arises.

This creates instant value for loyalty and “mobile butler” apps. If you’re the CIO of an IKEA-sized venue, and you know that a quarter of a million people downloaded your loyalty app, you’re probably still ho-hum about the whole thing. Why? Because most people aren’t accustomed to opening the app of the store they’re entering.

However, what’s “intelligent” about intelligent Wi-Fi is that it can awaken the app, to trigger the “Hey Harry,  free Wi-Fi” offer. Next, help him find what he’s looking for. Again, Harry’s mobile butler: “What are you looking for, Harry?” Uh, a drafting table. “Drafting tables are on aisle 10 and there is a special today – 20 percent off.” Result: One sold drafting table. User-pulled, not vendor-pushed.

Or, consider a mobile app / intelligent network launch we did with AT&T and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. When you enter, a green light flashes near the antenna icon on your phone. Selecting it returns nearby services – maps, restroom locations, guided tours and more. The café  can detect slowdowns in the mid-afternoon, based on dwell times and crowding (flow control is another proven use for intelligent Wi-Fi.) It auto-generates a trigger that pushes an offer to museum-goers – “Free hot cocoa in the cafe!” – to attract appetites, and thus sales.

Jared Headley is director, service provider mobility, for Cisco. 

Photo courtesy Richard Paul Kane/Shutterstock.com.

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Under the Times‘ Starbucks plan, which went into effect last week but was announced today, readers will be entitled to read three articles a day from each of the News, Business, Technology and Most Emailed sections. The Times will also offer three more articles from a rotating list of other sections like Sports.

The Starbucks offer comes at a time when the Times is tightening loopholes around its so-called “metered paywall” which caps readers at 10 free articles a month.

Times spokesperson, Linda Zebian, confirmed by phone that the 15 articles available through Starbucks are in addition to the 10 free monthly ones. The catch, however, is that the Times’ chooses the free Starbucks stories. It offers them on a special landing page that looks like this:

Zebian would not provide specifics about the business arrangements between the Times and Starbucks, and only noted that the Times has long sold its newspapers through the coffee chain. Most Starbucks locations across the country provide free Wi-Fi.

The Starbucks gambit is just one way that news brands are using Wi-Fi to promote and distribute their digital content. In August, the Wall Street Journal announced a plan to provide free Wi-Fi access in more than 1300 hotspots in New York and San Francisco; the only requirement is for readers to log-in to the Journal’s website. These Wi-Fi schemes provide the news companies not only with exposure, but also allow them to glean valuable customer data such as where and when readers visit their sites.

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The new feature should be especially useful in areas with high wireless network concentration and in regions where voice calling minutes are still expensive. While handy in the U.S., for example, voice over Wi-Fi is likely to appeal in areas where the BlackBerry brand is still strong: Emerging markets that don’t yet have cheap voice minutes over cellular or are limited by cellular network coverage.

A video demonstration made by Research In Motion illustrates the seamless experience of starting a voice call from a message thread. One button tap initiates the call, keeping the message stream open for IMs or photo sharing.

Research In Motion says the updated BBM 7 client is supported on handsets running the BlackBerry 6 OS software now, with anticipated support for older devices running BB 5 OS early next year.

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The Smart Thinq refrigerator got a lot of press last year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as smart appliances were all the rage. At the time the press was excited by the Android-based OS that enabled the fridge to communicate with your smartphone and share information like the contents of the fridge. The idea was that when someone got home from the grocery store they could choose to tell the fridge what was inside using a touchscreen or they could scan a bar code on their receipt that would contain the information about their purchases.

In this ideal world, the fridge would then be able to suggest recipes for the family based on their weight goals, age, gender and whatnot. If the consumer selected a fridge-offered recipe the appliance could shoot the recipe to the Smart Thinq over and it could preheat. All of the connectivity occurs via Wi-Fi, and the controls are based in the phone and in the touchscreen.

For people like me who grocery shop against a meal plan for a week,the recipe features don’t sound all that appealing, but other features such as calorie counting or notifying me of expiration dates are pretty cool. And if grocery stores participate – assuming we get some data standards for food — then the fridge could identify when certain items are out and order them for home delivery.

The refrigerator that launched Nov. 14 in South Korea costs 4,790,000 won or ($4,425.30) which is a high price to pay for a refrigerator that doesn’t also cook your food for you, but if it gets to a point where it would do my grocery shopping I’d probably pay for that.

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Through the month of September, readers will be able to use, courtesy of the Journal, 1300 hotspots blanketing large swathes Manhattan, including high traffic neighborhoods like Times Square and West Village. The service is also available in parts of three other boroughs. In San Francisco, the Wi-Fi will be available in places like Nob Hill and Fisherman’s Wharf.

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So why is the conservative Journal giving out free internet service to all comers? According to a spokesperson, “We’re always looking for ways to give people the opportunity to sample The Wall Street Journal. This is the latest in a long history of those efforts.”

This is one of the paper’s more novel initiatives but it may prove effective. While it’s unlikely that an iPad-touting tourist in Central Park is going to whip out a credit card and subscribe, the free Wi-Fi could be a terrific way for the Journal to let new users encounter its homepage (provided the service doesn’t have the janky qualities of some other free Wi-Fi initiatives).

The paper will also garner valuable customer data since non-subscribers must register to access the WiFi. Existing subscribers can simply log-in using their accounts; this too promises to deliver a trove of marketing data about the places that Journal readers frequent.

Here’s a screenshot from the Journal page promoting the service (sorry Uptown, no Wi-Fi for you!)

(Image by phloxii via Shutterstock)

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News coming from Paris tells of a fresh initiative to bring free wireless access to public transport, bringing the city’s offering more in line with its cross-channel rival.

Thanks to WiFi provider GOWEX, a range of different public spaces across Paris will now have free wireless access — including railway stations, some RER commuter lines, and bus stops. It also includes three Metro stations: Place-d’Italie, Pont-de-Sèvres and Chaussée-d’Antin.

As Le Monde reports, it’s not perfect. But something, surely, is better than nothing:

The company claims that its service will eventually be deployed to other stations.

Access will only be possible in the stations themselves, not inside moving trains. Users wishing to use the free GOWEX service on their tablet or phone will have to install an application that states the rate will be 1Mbps.

There is already WiFi for some Metro travelers, thanks to an initiative from telco SFR that covers 50 stations. But that’s only for subscribers — not everyone. This move is much more like London, which is working with Virgin Media ahead of the Olympics to provide free access across some 80 underground stations.

And this is a trend that’s not just on one side of the Atlantic, either. On Tuesday Google and Boingo teamed up to provide a similar service in six NYC stations in what’s being called “the summer of free Wi-Fi”. Some of the connectivity was already in place, but it’s an interesting move — although the implication of the marketing push is that when the summer comes to an end, so will the giveaway.

Image courtesy of Flickr User bredgur

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The San Diego startup has raised about $10 million of the $30 million round so far. It raised $11.5 million only a year ago. In March this year, the company told Xconomy that it had raised $37 million since its inception and was planning to start a new round.

On-Ramp says its radios can find and receive signals that are too weak for competing technologies to detect, and they are able to send those signals using less power. The heart of the technology is a set of algorithms that increases the sensitivity of the radios to capture the weak signals.

The startup, founded in 2008, told Technology Review last year that it only needed to use 35 access points to connect with smart meters and other network devices over a 4,000 square-mile area when a competing wireless technology would require over 1,000 access points.

On-Ramp is marketing its technology not only for smart meter rollouts but also for tracking the performances of a variety of industrial equipment over a large and sometimes remote region, from transmission networks to gas pipelines. The company says its wireless technology will work well to monitor power lines buried deep underground.

The company’s technology isn’t meant to send massive amount of data, and it’s engineered  to connect devices that operate at less than 50 bits per second. But it could complement other wireless technologies such as WiFi, cellular or WiMAX or compete against them in a smart grid buildout, depending on how utilities design their networks. Other wireless technology developers competing for utilities’ attention include Silver Spring Networks, SmartSynch (now part of Itron), and Trilliant.

On-Ramp has been working on a trial in South Korea in a smart meter project with Fountain Springs and Korea Telecom. Last August, On-Ramp announced that it would sell its wireless equipment in North America and the United Kingdom through Science Application International Corp.

On-Ramp’s technology sounds solid, but whether it can price the tech competitively will be just as important for the company. As a startup, it also will have to show that it will be able to stick around to help its customers to deal with any repair and maintenance problems.

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So far it’s been clear that the company has been winning users from incumbent mobile networks, with an incredibly low-cost package that starts at just a few Euros each month. But precisely how many people have signed up has been a mystery — until now.

The numbers are in, and they’re higher than most estimates: in the three months since officially launching, Free has brought on 2.6 million new subscribers.

That’s an unprecedented number, at least in the last decade or so of the European mobile market.

To put it into context, France has a market for around 67 million mobile subscriptions. The current leader, France Telecom’s Orange, has around 24 million users, followed by Vivendi-owned SFR, with 20 million, and third place Bouygues Telecom with around 11 million. Free is now firmly in fourth spot, with around 4 percent of the overall market.

And it seems that it has taken its subscribers from those big rivals, not the pre-pay market, since the number of requests to switch numbers from one operator to another is also 2.6 million (which is triple the usual rate).

Still, things aren’t perfect. Many consumers have complained that Free’s network is poor, and it’s not yet clear whether the WiFi offloading service — which was only switched on last month — is operating as intended. At the same time, rival networks say that the rate of defections has slowed dramatically in recent weeks, perhaps as customers wise up.

There’s also the question of finance — how much it cost to get those 2.6 million users on board, and how expensive the system that Free operates (which is reliant on a deal with Orange) actually is. But Free has deep pockets thanks to its parent company, French ISP Iliad. One thing’s for certain: all eyes will be on its next quarterly report in August.

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The built in “Play To” function for Windows is supported on numerous televisions and stereo systems, but this is the first supported speaker that I can recall seeing. The Aris is large — 6.5 inches high by 14.75 inches wide — so you’re certainly not going to carry it around all the time. For listening to music wirelessly around the home, however, it should work nicely. The device offers 100W RMS of power and has six internal speakers, three sound modes — natural, bass boost, and enhanced stereo — and can connect to protected Wi-Fi networks.

I’m actually surprised that so few companies are building speakers compatible with Microsoft’s “Play To” functionality. Apple’s AirPlay, which also uses Wi-Fi as the network transport, seems to be a big hit with consumers that want to share music and videos from an iOS device to a larger screened computer, external AirPlay speakers or an Apple TV.

Since music files are readily stored on mobile devices and computers, it just makes sense to have a simple method to shoot that media wirelessly to different rooms or devices. I don’t have any knowledge of what Microsoft is planning for Windows Phone 8, but if I were on the design team, I’d make darn sure that “Play To” is part of the mobile platform.

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The new “highly integrated 802.11n single-stream Wi-Fi system-in-package with integrated networking stack” is focused on smart home & building controls and appliances. Atheros and other chip companies such as ARM are betting that the Internet of Things will prove to be a new giant market opportunity.

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