Re: What do you think about the "cloudification" of mobile?

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 1/25/22 20:06, Michael Thomas wrote:

> That's what I've been trying to figure out as well. The use case of 
> seamless handoff across large regions is fairly niche imo. Sure that 
> was the original motivation for cell phones, but smartphones are about 
> as statically located as laptops and nobody is rushing to get their 
> laptops seamless handoff capabilites. That handoff capability comes at 
> a tremendous cost in both spectrum and coverage.
>
> Since everybody has their own wifi it seems that federating all of 
> them for pretty good coverage by a provider and charging a nominal fee 
> to manage it would suit a lot of people needs. It doesn't need 
> expensive spectrum and the real estate is "free". Basically a 
> federation of "guestnets".

Yes - WiFi Offload is more attractive to MNO's than building out more 
base stations, I believe. The problem is that it's easier if they could 
do this without also having to roll out a large scale wi-fi network, 
themselves.

So they have to focus on one, and I've tended to find wi-fi deployments 
by MNO's take more of a back seat, as it's about reaching as many 
customers as possible, even at the lowest common denominator of performance.

Mark.