Convergence Of Mobile & Wifi: Way Of The Future? - Wi-Fi Now Episode 2

On this week’s show were taking on one of the big questions in wireless: Is mobile/Wi-Fi convergence the way of the future?

Earlier this week we saw a couple of announcements indicating a surge in interest. T-Mobile USA is partnering with Bright House in Florida to offer seamless roaming for T-Mobile subscribers on Bright House’s 37.000 Wi-Fi hotspots in Florida – and Boingo’s CEO David Hagan said that interest in offload is ‘pretty amazing and pretty awesome’ following Boingo’s offload deal with Sprint earlier this year.

We ask David Heit of Pravala whether he thinks convergence is inevitable. Pravala provides intelligent device client solutions for Wi-Fi offload to ‘Wi-Fi First’-type service providers in North America & elsewhere. David is a big proponent of the ‘not free but included’ business model for Wi-Fi access. He will also comment on the needs and use case opportunities in connecting cars to outside Wi-Fi networks.

Also on this week’s show: NASA JPL’s Adrian Tang who has developed new Wi-Fi chip technology that may be able to save you 99.9% of your wearable’s battery consumption. The NASA JPL system uses reflection technology to do this and there’s already a great deal of interest in commercializing the patent. The invention also allows for much faster transmission compared to traditional Wi-Fi chipsets.

Finally, David Witkowski, President & CEO of WCA.org talks about the battle for the 5GHz band between LTE-U and Wi-Fi. David is organizing a major event in the Bay Area next week where representatives from both sides will debate the issue. David says he’s not seen a more heated debate in his 20 years of working in the wireless industry.

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