Is Wi-fi Offloading Really Good?

Some operators are evaluating alternative options such as Wi-fi offloading for balancing traffic, especially in dense urban areas where the likelihood of congestion is very high

Though the operators have been lamenting about 3G not taking off yet in India, it is a question of time before their networks are flooded with traffic, especially data and internet. With a meager amount of spectrum allocated for their 3G operations (viz, 2 × 5 MHz in 2,100 MHz), some operators are already scouting for alternative methods for balancing the traffic, especially in dense urban areas where the likelihood of congestion is very high. One of the widely deployed methods is Wi-Fi offloading.

Wi-Fi Offloading

Wi-Fi offloading is a method by which the traffic is diverted from the carrier’s macro cellular network to a localized Wi-Fi network, installed typically in homes, enterprises or public locations, thus relieving the licensed spectrum used. Such Wi-Fi hot spots can be deployed by the owner of the venues as ‘Private hotspots’ (eg, homes, office premises, cafes and restaurants such as Starbuck, Costa Coffee, hotels) or by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as ‘public hotspots’ typically in areas such as airports and malls; or mobile operators either by themselves, or in partnership with ISPs as ‘carrier Wi-Fi hotspots’.

Though deployment in the former two cases exists in plenty even in India (though lags behind much in terms of number of public Wi-Fi hotspots compared to other countries), the carrier Wi-Fi is yet to take off. One of the reasons is the failure in the growth of data traffic on 3G networks. However, a recent Cisco Visual Networking Index report shows that global mobile data traffic grew by more than 133% in 2011 to about 597 petabytes, which is about 8 times larger