Wi-Fi integration - Easing hotspot issues

People want to be able to use their smartphones, laptops, tablets and other devices everywhere, and so they need access to 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi. Now that mobile broadband and mobile multimedia services are so popular, subscribers are beginning to expect broadband access to be available wherever they go – not just at home or in the office. People want to be able to connect from their cars, on the train, in aircraft, from remote locations, in the urban jungle and even from areas where it is difficult to provide access, such as in mines, tough terrain or subway tunnels.

Subscribers downloading and watching video content, and using video-communication services are expected to be the primary drivers of this tenfold increase in mobile data-traffic over a five-year period. The strong growth in Wi-Fi-enabled handsets with SIM-based authentication provides additional opportunities to capture residential and hotspot services – such as those often available at airports that use web-login techniques. As with most types of growth, this development represents both opportunities and challenges for operators to inte-grate Wi-Fi – allowing them to increase mobile-broadband reach while maintaining convenience for subscribers.

In Ericsson’s vision for Wi-Fi integration in fourth-generation IP networks, traffic from SIM-based terminals can be routed through the mobile service-delivery cluster – PGWs, GGSNs and other value-added services – to enable mobile service-logic to apply for subscribers using Wi-Fi. This approach maximizes an operator’s existing investment in packet core and enables authenticated subscriber access over the fixed network.