Wang Jianzhou, CEO of China Mobile, to the audience at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week that Wi-Fi should be the default for mobile users because smartphones and tablets are killing cellular networks. At the opening keynote, he made the following remarks:
- Handset makers should embed Wi-Fi and make it the default connection.
- China Mobile will have 1 million Wi-Fi hotspots in 3 years (see our stories, Ruckus Wireless wins huge China citywide Wi-Fi project and Chinese telecom operators getting serious about WiFi).
- Wireless cellular networks will never be able to keep up with mobile data demand and therefore, Wi-Fi must be rolled out in public areas to offload data traffic.
Sadly, the last point is what municipal wireless networks in the United States never got a chance to achieve. Municipalities in the US were trying to roll out these networks, a few years too early, before launch of the iPhone and the tsunami of Android phones.
In life, timing is everything: the massive demand from mobile users had not yet occurred and there was (and perhaps still is) not enough wired backhaul in the form of fiber networks. There are a few successful muni WiFi networks in the US, but I believe that most of them will be deployed outside the United States.
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