Devicescape CVN grows to 20 million wifi hotspots

Wifi offload specialist Devicescape has announced that its Curated Virtual Network (CVN) of amenity wifi hotspots has grown 82 per cent year on year to more than 20 million hotspots worldwide. The firm added that figure should grow to 100 million hotspots by the end of 2017.

Devicescape claims its CVN is the largest virtualised carrier wifi network in the world and recently conducted trials in North America and Europe that it said confirmed its status as being at least twice the size of the next largest carrier wifi network.

The 20 million hotspots have been selected from a global pool of 315 million and are constantly available to end users of Devicescape’s customer networks, the firm said.

“By leveraging amenity wifi, telecom operators can bring an ‘always best connected’ experience to their customers for a fraction of the cost of alternatives,” said Dave Fraser, CEO at Devicescape.

“Our curation technology dynamically seeks, tests and adds tens of thousands of wifi hotspots to the CVN every day—making it the perfect complement to carrier deployed wifi.”

Last week, it was revealed that telecoms operators are the organisations with the best brands and market positions to offer a coherent, nationwide wifi service,  according to the 2014 Telecoms.com Intelligence Global Industry Survey. More than 80 per cent of respondents to the 2014 Survey felt that telcos were the most natural providers of wifi, with 54.1 per cent identifying mobile operators and 26.4 per cent identifying fixed operators.

Commenting on the findings, Devicescape’s Fraser said that the results chimed with a reassessment of wifi among the mobile operator community.

“Operator views on wifi have undergone a dramatic shift in recent years,” Fraser said. “Dismissal and even outright hostility towards wifi is being replaced by a creative urge to explore how it can be harnessed as a complement to existing network architectures.”

The 2014 Telecoms.com Intelligence Global Industry Survey drew responses from more than 2,000 industry professionals, including more than 700 operator representatives. The full report from the survey will be made available in February. You can register to receive the report here.

Register to attend the forthcoming Telecoms.com webinar in association with Devicescape for an EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW of the results from the Carrier Wifi section of the 2014 Telecoms.com Intelligence Global Industry Survey