The future of cellular is now inextricably bound to Wi-Fi. A Webinar next week will explore this reality in detail.
A couple of months ago I wrote about Ixia’s recent White Paper on cellular offload best practices, a subject near and dear to my heart. I have been arguing essentially forever that the future of cellular, the wide-area wireless/mobile capability we all take for granted, is now inextricably tied to Wi-Fi, even though Wi-Fi has long been perceived by many as the enemy of cellular operators everywhere. It’s easy to understand why such a misperception flourished for so many years – public-access Wi-Fi, after all, got its start during a time when local politicians everywhere argued that Wi-Fi should be a municipal service, except that unlike police, fire, water, sewer, schools, and picking up the trash, Wi-Fi should be both universal and free. This nonsense thankfully died a natural death, and now we’ve today got a good base of both technology and market demand from which to build pervasive, reliable, wireless services that, while certainly not free (there is, I will still argue, no such thing as free), are capable of addressing the intense but still-increasing loads that are as inevitable as tomorrow.
So, anyway, I am very pleased that Ixia and Mobile Europe have invited me to speak in a Webinar, to be held next week, on this very subject. Now, while justification is no longer and issue, merging cellular and Wi-Fi is anything but a slam dunk. But there are solutions, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. While the target audience is carriers and operators (and a global audience, at that), anyone working in public-access or even enterprise Wi-Fi will gain a lot from sitting in on this one, as will those who depend upon cellular, which is just about everybody today. We’ve also convinced Ruckus Wireless, a leader in deploying public-access Wi-Fi solutions, to sit in and offer their expertise as to what works, what doesn’t, and what anyone deploying these solutions needs to look out for.
This is a very important topic, and will remain such for some time yet. Registration is free, and I hope you can attend.
