DT Seamless Connectivity app seeks to take the pain out of public wifi

For anyone who has ever been forced onto rubbish wifi when 4G was doing the job just fine, Deutsche Telekom has a crazy idea that might just work.

Just as Telecoms.com was reflecting on an industry feeling that all this talk about 5G was somewhat premature when, for many, any kind of connection is far from guaranteed, DT was sneaking out a little announcement that could have been tailor-made to address those concerns.

The Seamless Connectivity app is still only in beta phase, so apparently warrants only a blog post rather than a full press release. DT corporate blogger Thorben Stange took time away from adusting his new hoodie to blog on the matter, concurring that connectivity is a current megatrend.

He explained that the search is on for something that can manage the many connection possibilities available to us as a given time. Ideally such a thing would automatically manage public wifi logins – which by itself would be a welcome relief from protracted and counter-intuitive individual login rituals – but would crucially also dynamically switch back to mobile data as soon as the wifi connection wasn’t up to scratch.

If you have signed up to a number of public wifi networks such as BT wifi, you will find yourself being constantly shunted onto them whenever they come within range, regardless of how convenient that might be to you at the time. Not only is that connection often inferior to your 4G one, but there is usually at least a lag when you’re connected to neither. For your correspondent the most infuriating one is Addison Lee, which is great when you’re in one of their cars but not so good when you’re walking and your stream is interrupted just because one of them happens to drive past.

The DT Seamless Connectivity app claims to be able to ensure you’re on the best kind of connectivity at all times. The automated login facility is supported by algorithmic cleverness that somehow knows what the best choice is. If there is any doubt in the app’s otherwise omniscient electronic mind, hybrid access is chosen that, in principal, should provide the best of both worlds.

As ever the proof of this will be in the eating, and this app is set to arrive in spring 2017 – so any day now. Initially the beta will be extended to DT national subsidiaries and then, so long as it goes according to plan, will have a full roll-out over the course of the year. It will be interesting to see if this sort of thing resonates with end-users as, surely, most will have experienced the wifi hotspot anguish it has been designed to address.