March 11, 2008

Aircell Names In-Flight Service, Targets Spring

By Glenn Fleishman

Om Malik reports straight from the CEO’s mouth that Aircell’s in-flight broadband service will be called gogo: Their Web site is live, but watch out for the audio in the Flash intro—I thought someone was pounding on my door. CEO Jack Blumenstein told Malik of GigaOm that service will cost $12.95 for cross-country flights and $9.95 for flights of three hours’ duration or less, commensurate with earlier reports. They’re working with aggregators and corporate resellers, as well as lower-rate plans for handhelds like the iPhone, and frequent flyer flat-rate plans. I expect given their costs and the advantages of loyalty, Aircell could charge as little as $100 per month for unlimited use, and all involved would be happy about this. I would expect real price sensitivity above $100 per month.

Malik gets a few previously unknown technical details out of Blumenstein: the system’s capacity is intended to be 250,000 broadband users; it’s currently operational even though not in use; and they plan to increase their current number of 92 antennas to 500 when fully deployed.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 11:42 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Air Travel | Comments (0)

March 11, 2008

Mobile Post: Future of Hotspots, Backhaul of Cellular

By Glenn Fleishman

Some thoughts about backhaul, cell networks, and the future of hotspots: Do hotspots whither and die when everyone has mobile broadband? Only if everyone—not just teenagers—is writing email while walking down the street, driving with one hand and watching movies with another, and conducting all phone calls in motion. Fixed locations can provide higher bandwidth to a small number with lower costs.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:18 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Hot Spot | Comments (0)

Latest iPass Usage Stats Show Trends in Business Usage

By Glenn Fleishman

iPass has released its latest semi-annual statistics: The company is looking for a little attention, of course, but they provide a relatively huge amount of data (relative to everyone else in the industry) that helps highlight trends in Wi-Fi hotspot and, new this time around, 3G usage worldwide. Their user base is largely corporations that integrate iPass into their networks to allow worldwide roaming at set or metered rates on Wi-Fi, mobile broadband (via laptop), and dial-up with a single corporate login and end-point policy enforcement. This gives them numbers that reflect usage among the mainstream corporate business traveler.

The company found that European usage is accelerating, with Europe now accounting for 40 percent of their sessions worldwide in the second half of 2007, up from 31 percent in the second half of 2006. (All contemorary numbers are from 2007’s second half.) North American usage dropped from 60 to 51 percent during that period as a percentage of the whole. As an increase, European usage jumped almost 150 percent while North American usage doubled: iPass saw nearly 2m sessions worldwide at Wi-Fi hotspots, up from just over 1m in the same period a year ago. Worldwide growth in total sessions year over year was 89 percent.

Rick Bilodeau, vice president of corporate and channel marketing, said that growth in Wi-Fi usage represented in part frustration with high 3G roaming costs in Europe. He said that European regulation has already forced a price drop for 3G roaming, however. It’s “coming down from the stratosphere; they’re going to drop into the 50,000-foot range. These drops still don’t make 3G roaming affordable. Your break-even is now 5 emails instead of 2,” he said, referring to the potential for emails to carry megabytes of attachments and 3G plans charging per-megabyte roaming fees.

European Wi-Fi prices still outpace North America’s, and Bilodeau said a drop in 3G roaming might “start to apply pressure to European Wi-Fi prices.”

iPass found big jumps in usage at venues outside of hotels (29 percent) and airport (45 percent): cafes, restaurants, transit, and other categories. Cafe usage grew modestly, from roughly 175,000 sessions to nearly 250,000 sessions, but restaurant usgae jumped from 25,000 to about 80,000 sessions. “The restaurant growth is really driven by McDonald’s around the world,” Bilodeau said. The fast-food giant started marketing their Wi-Fi service more broadly in 2007. The service has been in place in some restaurants for three or more years in the U.S. iPass includes not just domestic McDonald’s stores, but has a total of 10,000 outlets worldwide in their roaming network.

London tops city usage, and experienced 156 percent year-over-year usage growth exclusive of London hotels and airports. Only 8 countries saw more usage than the metropolis of London.

With 2.5G and 3G usage, the company tracks just laptop users which have roaming and service agreements handled by iPass. The firm found that as users become more accustomed to mobile broadband, they start using more data, with established users (those with accounts before 2007) using significantly more data than users who started service in 2007. Both categories of users increased their monthly average usage by about 25 percent across the year, which comes in part from larger, more compelling downloadable content. (Read: YouTube.)

A stat that jumped out at me from their report was the breakdown of exclusive 2.5G, exclusive 3G, and mixed 2.5G/3G usage within a given month by their customers. Only 3 percent of users only used 2.5G, which isn’t unusual, as iPass is selling 3G service. But just 38 percent used 3G exclusively; 59 percent used a combination of 2.5G and 3G.

What interested me was that there was a group that was able to use just 3G—that’s tricky even in excellent coverage areas, as even a minor hiccup could downshift a user to a slower network offering. Bilodeau said that users adapt to where bandwidth is best, and that many users are “bumblebees,” an industry term referring to those who roam, but with predictable pattern.

“Where I work may be dictated by where I get a 2.5G or 3G connection,” he said. “You adapt your habits to fit your technology.”

iPass also found that just a tiny percentage of its 3G users were extremely heavy downloaders: just 0.5 percent topped 2 GB in a month, while 32 percent used 50 MB or less per month. Their 3G users are also regulars: more than 90 percent of 3G subscribers used the service in any given month. This makes sense, as the cost of 3G remains high enough that there’s little point in subscribing if you’re not making use of it; and using it justifies continuing to subscribe.

iPass makes available a variety of tables of this data on their Web site.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 5:00 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Hot Spot, Road Warrior | Comments (0)

March 10, 2008

Wi-Fi Hotspot Irrelevance: Give Me Whatever Ericsson’s CMO Is Smoking

By Glenn Fleishman

The chief marketing office of Ericsson, a handset maker, says that Wi-Fi hotspots will be increasingly irrelevant: This story has some legs because it’s so outrageous. But let’s examine what John Bergendahl means.

From a handset perspective, the increasing availability of 3G, its ever-faster speeds, the roadmap for 3G’s evolution and 4G services, the capabilities of handsets, and the services that people actually want on handsets (viewing movies, streaming video from YouTube, taking and sending high-quality photos) are all factors that make Wi-Fi less relevant.

In Europe, Asia, and America, there’s enough capacity and enough advanced devices to do interesting things now, but usage hasn’t grown fast enough—partly due to excessive pricing—to drive aggregate speeds down for users except in the most congested areas. I’ve heard scattered reports of people seeing 3G slowdowns at conferences and so forth. The 2.5G EDGE network basically failed at Macworld Expo last January because of the thousands of iPhones all trying to grab a slice of limited spectrum in San Francisco.

Bergendahl sees the challenges as coverage, availability, and price. That’s all true, and in Europe more so than in the U.S. Europe has better coverage and availability, but the price for roaming outside one’s home country or network is extraordinarily high. Some voluntary efforts to drop roaming prices are underway to forestall 3G data price regulation by the European Commission, such as went into effect 25-June-2007 for voice roaming.

The problem is that he is thinking as a handset maker: he’s thinking about capabilities, selling more handsets, and overall revenue from value-added services that he can make sure his devices deliver. This is fine. But it’s not how carriers think. There’s a growing disconnect between capabilities built into handsets and those offered by carriers. Nokia’s insistence on building somewhat open-platform phones with Wi-Fi and video capabilities have hardly been leapt on by European carriers, and those devices aren’t sold at all in the U.S.

Really, Wi-Fi is a heat-sink, a complement to 3G. It’s a way to inject bandwidth into a network at fixed locations where someone might sit to watch a video or carry out some task that involves being static. You can make phone calls in motion, but you’re rarely jogging or driving while watching a video or composing email. (Okay, studies show lots of emails written by drivers. Still.)

Wi-Fi can be fed through direct wired network connections, allowing carriers to offload bandwidth-intensive tasks without disallowing them. Apple, for instance, only allows its iTunes Store to be used over Wi-Fi on an iPhone or iPod touch—as the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store—rather than stress the EDGE network’s low capacity.

You can see how T-Mobile and BT are pairing Wi-Fi and voice, and building networks that allow them to compete for the best cellular customers, letting those customers talk longer but use a much cheaper medium over which calls are placed. AT&T hasn’t gotten the religion yet about pairing Wi-Fi and cellular plans, but that’s clearly coming, and with a 17,000-plus hotspot U.S. market, we’re going to see some new ideas from them, too.

Really, 3G doesn’t compete against Wi-Fi because the same operators that run 3G networks can benefit directly from Wi-Fi networks. Until 4G networks are built, Wi-Fi’s local network speed and its typical backhaul speed will far outpace what cellular can deliver, and occupying cellular frequencies with big downloads is a poor use of scarce frequency over which other revenue can be better extracted.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 2:48 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Hot Spot | Comments (2)

March 6, 2008

Airport Operations Relying on WEP, AirTight Finds

By Glenn Fleishman

The latest news from Wi-Fi security vendor AirTight is that airports leak data: The folks at AirTight regularly suit up, carry Wi-Fi monitoring gear around, and report on how bad people are at securing networks—laughably, often at Wi-Fi and security conferences. Their latest bit of PR has a lot of bad news in it, worth reporting. They found that in testing across 14 U.S., Canadian, and Asian airports, that they found unsecured and WEP-protected networks on 80 percent of the visible non-public networks. They believe that some of those networks are used for logistics and operations. (They wisely didn’t probe too far; they could have wound up in the pokey in some states and countries.) They scanned 478 access points.

They also found that 10 percent of the laptops they scanned—out of a total of 585 Wi-Fi clients—had an ad-hoc network in place. That’s the “Free Wi-Fi” network you see whenever you’re in public, which is spread by people connecting to the network, which is then advertised to other people. While the network itself may just be an artifact of Windows XP’s damaged ideas about how to advertise network availability, connecting to another laptop via an ad hoc method creates the potential that any viruses you or they have will be shared.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 3:14 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Air Travel, Security | Comments (0)

Apple Opens iPhone to Developers, Enterprises

By Glenn Fleishman

Apple adds enterprise features to the iPhone, including 802.1X, and opens it to developers: Today’s announcement from Steve Jobs was full of surprises, including the fact that Apple licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync for full Exchange support, and the level at which developers will have access to iPhone hardware and information.

The 2.0 software, free to all current owners of iPhone, will be available in June, which kind of tips the hand as to when we’ll see a 3G iPhone, too, I imagine. iPod touch owners will pay a “nominal” upgrade fee, as Apple books iPhone revenue over 24 months and iPod revenue as units are sold.

Apple will pile in all the stuff that enterprises demanded from Research in Motion in the Blackberry platform—and that RIM built in—including support for 802.1X (including WPA2 Enterprise) for authenticated Wi-Fi login, two-factor authentication, certificates, and additional VPN types. They’re also adding “remote bricking,” a critical feature that allows a stolen or misused phone to be remotely and securely wiped.

On the developer side, Apple is opening up the whole puppy in a way that I didn’t expect. I assumed the firm would put limits on whether the cell data connection could be used by apps, but not restrict the Wi-Fi side. The announcement puts nothing off limits except VoIP over cell data, although there’s a list of characteristics that software can’t contain, such as being malicious or a bandwidth hog. All software is distributed and installed via App Store, available on an iPhone or in iTunes for synchronization. This includes free software. Apple will therefore vet, and ostensibly be able to halt use of programs that exhibit behavior they deem bad. Jobs said, “We can turn off the spigot if we need to.” Every app will be signed by a developer certificate.

Developers can have access to location information provided by Google (cell towers) and Skyhook (Wi-Fi) for use in their programs. No mention was made of privacy settings for such. Skyhook’s Loki toolbar requires that you grant permission to Web sites that want to obtain your location details; I expect a system-wide approach to that, too.

No mention was made today of a few particular problems with iPhone security, such as the ability to tunnel and traverse a VPN across multiple network media, such as using an iPhone for a secure connection while you travel from work, across the EDGE network, and to hotspots. This likely could be built on top of the enterprise features. You’d also need policy management, such as disallowing certain kinds of connections without a VPN being active or over non-trusted Wi-Fi networks.

Certainly, this is a big step forward for corporate users, mobile applications, and consumer ease on the iPhone platform. The beta is available today to developers; you can become a developer for $99. Amazingly, Apple’s developer site crashed and is still unavailable two hours after the press conference ended.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 1:05 PM | Permanent Link | Categories: Cellular, Enterprise, Future, Hot Spot, Location, Security | Comments (0)

Mobile Post: Entertainment Drives Transportation-Fi

By Glenn Fleishman

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at 10:38 AM | Permanent Link | Categories: Media, Streaming, Transportation and Lodging | Comments (0)

March 5, 2008

Wee-Fi: Denver Plays Nanny-Fi; Mariah Carey-Fi; Free Service Ups Usage on UK Rail Line

By Glenn Fleishman