Mobile operators best fit for public wifi provision says survey

Telecoms operators are the organisations with the best brands and market positions to offer a coherent, nationwide wifi service, according to data from the 2014 Telecoms.com Intelligence Global Industry Survey. But while fixed and mobile operators generally rated themselves over one another in this regard, a significant portion from each category favoured the other.

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. Specialist wifi providers scored poorly, with only 10.5 per cent of the votes, with internet players a little further off the pace, with 9.1 per cent.

Among operators themselves the scores were unsurprisingly weighted even more in their favour. 61.2 per cent of mobile operators and 56.3 per cent of fixed operators rated themselves as the most natural providers of such a wifi service.

What is perhaps more interesting, however, is that almost one fifth (19.4 per cent) of mobile operators selected fixed operators as the best fit and one quarter of fixed operator respondents selected mobile operators. There is evidently mixed opinion among operators as to where the wifi proposition should most logically sit.

Dave Fraser, CEO of Devicescape, which  provides a curated amenity wifi network to mobile operators, told Telecoms.com 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.

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