Bango blog

A senior Nokia executive at a recent Mobile 2.0 conference told me that some of their biggest mobile operator customers were concerned that the newest Nokia phones (N97, 5800) will switch automatically to WiFi if they detect a network.

The number of mobile users connecting through WiFi has risen sharply in recent months

 Some operators like the idea of users on “all you can eat” mobile web tariffs using WiFi – heavy users will not saturate the network. Mobile users like the typical speed increase they get – especially when in the home or office.

However, in the era of the intelligent mobile web, operators now worry about losing the connection with the user – they can’t see where the users are going, they can’t provide added value services, potentially they can’t protect the user from visiting the wrong web sites!

The amount of traffic coming from mobile phones connecting through WiFi has risen sharply in recent months. This seems to have been driven by the popularity of smart phones like the N95, Blackberries, WinMo devices and iPhones – all of which easily connect via WiFi. This is why it’s now so important to track which network mobile users are using – to optimize payment experience and for analytics.

The difficulty this presents to mobile operators is that they can’t see this traffic – because it bypasses their networks. When you access your operator home page via WiFi, the current experience on most networks is that you are turned away – you can’t access your account or buy from the portal.

The GSMA is sponsoring a survey about user habits and advertising – but I fear this will ignore the 33% of WiFi traffic – despite the fact that this is probably from the most active, leading edge users.

WiFi is a great opportunity for mobile operators and content providers, but they need the technology that will enable them to see their WiFi traffic so they can deliver a friendly mobile payment experience to their users as they swap between connections.

To remain “blind” to this trend in customer behavior – or worse still to actively resist it – is, I believe, wrong-headed. Fortunately, based on my experience, WiFi does not cause blindness – it merely exposes blindness to new revenue opportunities through some “old school” thinking.

Whatever you do, don’t lose sight of the rewards that WiFi can deliver if you are either a content provider or a mobile operator, and the value that partners like Bango add when it comes to capturing revenue from this growing segment of your customer base.