Some carriers still (and rather provincially, IMHO) view Wi-Fi as a threat. Verizon is clearly in this camp, with no real offering to speak of in terms of either services or devices. The upcoming BlackBerry Storm, arguably Verizon’s answer to the iPhone? No Wi-Fi. AT&T, of course, already has the iPhone, and they’ve just added the BlackBerry Bold to their line – kind of an iPhone for business types. And, like the iPhone, it has Wi-Fi.
And yesterday, AT&T acquired Wayport, a venerable hotspot operator that has been around for more than a decade by sticking to their core business and offering great service at a fair price. AT&T clearly sees Wi-Fi as strategic, and I think this will serve them very, very well going forward. Again, the carriers simply won’t have enough spectrum at a workable cost to put everyone on licensed services. Verizon will, I think, have trouble servicing all the demand that materializes while providing less-flexible subscriber units in the less-than-a-bargain they currently offer. Perhaps Wi-Fi-equipped devices arriving via their open-access strategy are designed to compensate for this, but I would not count on that in the near term if I were advising them. AT&T is setting itself up for significant growth by embracing Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi will be around regardless essentially forever.
T-Mobile, you may recall, also has a significant position in Wi-Fi; Sprint not so much. And it’s interesting that two of the three US carriers on the LTE track are also big supporters of Wi-Fi. It will, I believe, be the combination of those two technologies that will dominate mobile broadband in the not-too-distant future. Demand for metro-scale Wi-Fi will grow and the Wi-Fi chasm will be long forgotten. And the many detractors of hotspot/metro-scale/public-access Wi-Fi out there will eventually have to dine on a good deal of crow.
