DT and iPass plan Wi-Fi exchange for mobile operators

The hotspot aggregator iPass and the wholesale arm of Deutsche Telekom have teamed up to offer mobile operators the ability to more easily offload their customers' data traffic onto Wi-Fi.

The WiFi Mobilize services exchange, announced on Monday, will use iPass's Open Mobile Platform for authentication, billing and reporting. It will serve as a marketplace in which operators can make more money from their own domestic Wi-Fi networks, while also taking advantage of iPass's international hotspot network, iPass said.

While iPass's network offers over 518,000 hotspots worldwide, Deutsche Telekom's International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS) wholesale agreements with operators provide scale that the aggregator could not manage alone, iPass chief Evan Kaplan told ZDNet UK.

According to Kaplan, mobile operators are increasingly feeling the strain of heavy data use on their networks, and are keen to switch their customers to Wi-Fi connectivity where possible.

"[Deutsche Telekom] is the carrier that's most visionary about the role of Wi-Fi in telecoms infrastructure," Kaplan said. "It is almost always going to be cheaper to offer Wi-Fi. 3G and 4G networks have a tremendous amount of overhead — it is expensive to build out networks, buy spectrum and upgrade networks, whereas Wi-Fi is cheap and cheerful."

Operators may also want to bring devices that lack cellular connectivity but use Wi-Fi "under their auspices", Kaplan noted, adding that he thought Wi-Fi would in time "be the domain of mobile operators exclusively".

Kaplan also suggested that operators will increasingly want to use international Wi-Fi networks as a way of offloading traffic that would otherwise result in hefty data-roaming bills for their customers. "Carriers hate that a lot of people are so scared of [using their phones during] international travel that they just turn their phone off," he said. "For real browsing or data or game-playing, use the local Wi-Fi — [operators are] going to want to habituate people to that kind of experience."

Asked by ZDNet UK why carriers would want to move their customers off cellular data-roaming, which results in massive profits for those operators, Kaplan said Wi-Fi could "level the playing field quite a bit by offering people options", but he was not sure "that the fundamental dynamic is going to change".