Several mobile operators have been striking deals with wireless LAN service providers.
Many mobile operators are pursuing combined 3G and wireless local area network (wLAN) strategies. Austria’s ONE, owned by Orange, Telenor of Norway and TDC, this month bought a majority stake in broadband wireless service provider eWave. Telia of Sweden, Telenor and Telefonica of Spain are already rolling out public access wLANs. Orange has also bought into RadioFrame, which has developed a cellular-wLAN roaming solution for indoor environments.
Mobile operators are trying hard to target business users at the moment, as increasing revenue per user in the consumer space is proving incredibly difficult. While 3G will ultimately allow operators to offer advanced corporate mobile services, wireless LANs are a faster, cheaper and more immediate technology, due to 3G rollout delays and bandwidth issues.
Business users currently want mobile access to email and messaging, soon to be followed by field sales-force functionality. Heavier CRM and ERP functionality will follow in the longer term. While public wLAN operator MobileStar recently went bust, there are other firms vying to build wLANs in airports, coffee shops, and so on. It’s better for the mobile operators to have this technology in-house, pre-empting the potential competition.
wLANs also represent a new revenue opportunity, allowing mobile operators to complement their service portfolios, establish data leadership, showcase wireless data competence and broaden their brands before deploying 3G services. There are rumors mmO2 and T-Mobile will collaborate to develop revenues from wLAN hotspots.
But mobile operators will need to overcome some sizeable technical glitches. Many of these are in the handover between wLAN and public mobile networks, leaving a large opportunity for systems integrators if operators do not develop these skills in-house.
The main challenge will be the issue of security. The WEP privacy standard for wLANs is inadequate and is sometimes not deployed at all, making wLAN traffic easily interceptable for the hacker with enough patience to monitor a day’s traffic. The development and use of corporate mobile/wireless applications will only be truly trustworthy when these issues are resolved.