Phone Systems Featured Article

Wi-Fi is seemingly everywhere—from home routers, to public hotspots in cafes and stores, to seats on an airplane. As a result, the offload of cellular traffic to Wi-Fi is rapidly increasing, and is forecast to reach more than 17 Exabytes per month by 2018, according to ABI Research (News - Alert).

To put that into perspective, that’s greater than all 2G, 3G and 4G cellular traffic today, combined.

“With the majority of mobile traffic either originating or terminating indoors, Wi-Fi becomes a viable and robust access technology for 2G, 3G and 4G mobile operators,” said Nick Marshall, research director at ABI Research. “This is true whether the traffic is residential, which accounts for the majority of mobile traffic, enterprise or venue.”

He added that sports venues, transportation and healthcare continue to be the verticals which transport the most traffic in the commercial realm, with shopping malls and hospitality coming in a right behind that.

The shift comes as traffic volumes in general escalate; ABI expects all in-building wireless data traffic to grow at a double-digit rate, led by video, to reach more than 50 Exabytes per month worldwide in 2020.

As mobile broadband operators densify their networks to support the traffic increase, ABI said that North America will emerge as the region with the most distributed antennae system (DAS) spend, which will help boost indoor coverage. It’s followed by Asia-Pacific and then Europe. However, Asia-Pacific will continue to consume almost half the worldwide in-building wireless traffic throughout the forecast period, thanks to the large population in the region and its extensive Wi-Fi, 4G and leading-edge 5G deployments.

ABI also identified several vendors as reaping the most benefit from the trends: Alcatel-Lucent, Axell Wireless, Cisco, CommScope, Corning, Dali Wireless, Ericsson, Goodman Networks, JMA Wireless, Nokia Networks, TE Connectivity (News - Alert), Wireless Telecom Group and Zinwave.