Wavion bets high-capacity Wi-Fi will lure mobile operators to data offload

Wavion believes that mobile data offload is merely in its infancy in the U.S. The only thing preventing carrier Wi-Fi from maturing here is the right high-capacity, long-range gear. It’s no coincidence that Wavion is hoping to land its first North American mobile operator customers with just such a big-bandwidth, far-reaching platform.

Wavion today unveiled its WBSn portfolio of outdoor Wi-Fi products, specifically optimized for outdoor Wi-Fi deployments and carrier mobile data offload. The platform uses IEEE 802.11n radio technology coupled with its own two-way beamforming to create what it claims is the highest capacity and longest range outdoor Wi-Fi access points in the business. By utilizing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna technology, the WBSn AP can direct three spatial data streams at individual users generating links as big as 450 Mb/s. By stacking radios into a single unit, it can deliver gigabit capacities—more than 10 times the capacity of a today’s long-term evolution (LTE) carrier—and can extend Wi-Fi’s range to 300 meters in outdoor urban environments—a 50% gain over its competitors’ technology, said Lior Mishan, director of marketing for Wavion.

Mishan said that Wavion isn’t the first to implement 802.11n into its access points, but he claimed Wavion is the only vendor to take full advantage of the new Wi-Fi standard’s outdoor potential. “11n exists in outdoor environments today, but its performance has really been disappointing so far,” Mishan said. “Those systems are really designed for indoors so most of the capacity gains in 11n aren’t being realized. To get the full benefit of outdoor deployments we needed to combine it with beamforming.”

Of course, those huge capacity and range gains accrue only with 802.11n devices. The 11n standard is backwards compatible to 802.11b/g devices, but 11n can’t deliver the standard’s full capabilities to those lesser devices, which still include the majority of smartphones. That could soon change, though. The first 11n chips debuted in high-end smartphones last year and since then the Wi-Fi Alliance has certified 400 new 11n smartphones and handsets to date, and ABI Research projects that 87% of smartphones will sport 11n silicon in 2014. On laptops—which are the other half of the offload equation—the transition occurred much more quickly. According to the Alliance, nearly 100% of all laptops have been shipping with 11n for some time.

Wavion’s primary competitors, Ruckus Wireless and BelAir Networks, all offer outdoor 802.11n access points and offer support for beamforming, but Mishan insisted Wavion is the only vendor to integrate spatially adaptive two-way beamforming into a commercial product. Wavion has also tweaked the platform with a few extra features such as high-gain diversity polarized antenna array technology and interference mitigation technology that allow the Wavion network to keep its shape and resilience despite noisy airwaves and physical obstacles, Mishan said.

Even if Wavion’s performance claims are true, its competitors have a few things Wavion doesn’t, namely U.S. customers. Wavion’s success with offload networks has mainly been confined to Asia, while both Ruckus and BelAir have aggressively built their carrier Wi-Fi businesses in North America (CP: The birth of the wholesale mobile offload operator). BelAir has even moved beyond Wi-Fi offload to offer outdoor LTE and 3G small cells, using mobile broadband technology to offload mobile broadband networks (CP: BelAir stakes its claim in small cells). Meanwhile traditional indoor access point vendors like Cisco System are moving into the outdoor carrier Wi-Fi space.

But Mishan disagrees with any notion that Wavion has missed the boat in the North America. In fact, he said that today’s there’s little Wi-Fi offload market to speak of. AT&T is the most aggressive of the U.S. operators in augmenting its wide area networks with Wi-Fi, but it has outdoor hotzones in only a handful locations. Most of its 24,000 hotspots are indoor access points at restaurants, coffee shops and hotels, though just last week it did announce plans to deploy outdoor Wi-Fi in 20 New York City parks (CP: AT&T now has 460 mobile data offload points in NYC). Verizon Wireless just revealed plans to augment its EV-DO and LTE networks with Wi-Fi and even then only then sparingly (CP: VZW to offload 3G/4G data through free Wi-Fi hotspots). And while T-Mobile is using plenty of Wi-Fi to offload data, voice and SMS, it’s relied primarily on its customers own home and office Wi-Fi network and hasn’t built any hotspots of its own (Unfiltered: T-Mobile quietly builds up its Wi-Fi data offload operation).

Meanwhile, a study from DeviceScape found that consumers have an increasing expectation that their mobile service providers provide access to Wi-Fi networks in high-traffic areas (CP: Wi-Fi reliance increasing with growing mobile broadband adoption). Mishan said the big deployments of Wi-Fi for offload haven’t even begun, which makes the U.S. a wide-open market for this kind of technology. “It’s still a new market,” Mishan said. “We’re just seeing the beginning of it with AT&T.”