This is a customer perspective guest blog contributed by Dr. Derek Peterson, Boingo Wireless Chief Technology Officer.

In early 2014, Boingo made the bold move of launching Passpoint-enabled Wi-Fi at 26 airports throughout the U.S. and Brazil, bringing seamless, secure and instant Wi-Fi access to travelers with Passpoint-ready devices.

In partnership with Cisco, the Boingo team worked to launch Passpoint first in high-traffic locations serving tech savvy audiences hungry for a better way to connect. We found an ideal Passpoint pioneer deep in the heart of Texas: Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (ABIA), a long-time Boingo network partner.

The Austin airport has always been a technology trailblazer, focused on improving the customer experience by leveraging the best in new technologies and services. The airport was the first to offer Wi-Fi to passengers in 2000, and has since worked with Boingo to upgrade the network to meet today’s traveler connectivity needs.

ABIA is also serving an increasingly tech-savvy community. Austin is the gateway to one of the fastest growing culture and technology hubs in the United States, and has become a go-to spot for start-ups and tech companies. The city becomes the heart of the tech world every year for the South by Southwest festival, and the airport serves more passengers than ever before year-round, marking their first Read More »

Tags: BOINGO, mobility, Passpoint, Service Provider, wi-fi

I recently had the pleasure to read an excellent article by one of our industry’s leading analysts, Mr. Gabriel Brown of Heavy Reading titled “Analyzing Apple & VoLTE”. In this article, he makes the observation, that Apple – which is well known for keeping a strong focus towards their customer’s enjoying a high quality of experience – has included Voice over LTE (VoLTE) in their newest iPhones.  Mr. Brown goes on to quite rightly note that by including VoLTE, Apple makes the case that mobile operators now need an IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem (IMS core) and a functioning VoLTE service.

Figure 1: Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Forecast 2013-2018

While I absolutely agree that Apple has provided a strong endorsement to VoLTE by including support for this feature, I believe that the Apple iPhone6 support for Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) and Text over Wi-Fi maybe as important (or more so).  Let me explain.  VoLTE is really a fact of life, it is going to happen and as long as a cell phone supports LTE it will be able to make or receive VoLTE calls as long as the carrier implements to network accordingly.  However, Wi-Fi has long been maligned as the poor step-child of mobile broadband.  Mostly because it is unruly (unlicensed) and anyone can deploy it (don’t have to be a carrier).  And while the distance limitations and handoffs (Wi-Fi to 3G or to LTE) play a big role too those issues are being addressed (at least by Cisco).  However, several reports, including Cisco’s own well regarded Visual Networking Index (VNI) for Global Mobile Data Traffic, show that mobile data usage over Wi-Fi is over 40% in 2013.  In fact, it is projected that there will be more traffic offloaded from cellular networks onto Wi-Fi than remain on cellular networks by 2018 (that’s less than four years away).

This news is not Read More »

Tags: Evolved Packet Core, LTE, mobility, Service Provider, visual networking index, vni, voice over lte, VoLTE, wi-fi, wireless

With the growing influx of new mobile devices, connected things, bandwidth intensive applications and more data, the network is more relevant to business success than ever before.  Back in June of 2012, Cisco saw that we needed to move away from multiple network systems loosely linked together to an agile and simple infrastructure, streamlined policy and centralized management would be needed to support new business demands. We called it Cisco Unified Access and we aligned the solution to three pillars: One Network, One Policy and One Management.

For the last few years, we have focused on delivering new products and functionality under this Unified Access model. Below is a timeline of products released as part of the Unified Access framework. Cisco lead the way in delivering gigabit 802.11ac Wi-Fi., converged wireless control in access switches and through the acquisition of Meraki – a complete cloud-managed network solution.

The timeline above doesn’t represent every feature and function we have delivered, but it shows Cisco’s commitment to this Unified Access model, both from a cloud-managed and on-premise solution perspective.

Today, Cisco is announcing a number of new products and new functionality to existing products that will help mobilize the workforce, secure the business and increase IT agility. The announcement includes the following: Read More »

Tags: #80211ac, 11ac, 802.11ac, access, access point, Agile, agility, Aironet, anyconnect, AP, App, application, asr, bandwidth, business, byod, Cisco, compliance, converge, converged, Converged Access, data, device, emm, employee, Enterprise, experience, feature, foundation, function, gigabit, Guest, guest access, HD, HDX, high density, identity, indoor, infrastructure, interop, ISE, ISR, IT, LAN, lifecycle, Manage, management, MDM, meraki, mobile, mobility, model, network, operation, outdoor, policy, portfolio, prime, Prime Infrastructure, product, secure, security, services, simple, simplify, system, System Manager, technology, traffic, unified access, vpn, WAN, wi-fi, wifi, wired, wireless, wlan, workforce

In this continuing series of blogs about Mobile Data Monetization*, let’s look at the Service Provider Freemium business model, which involves offering a basic service for free (indefinitely, or for a trial period) to incent some other subscriber behavior that the operator can monetize. Let’s look at the typical reasons that operators have in offering a Freemium service:

1.) Encourage users to upgrade up to a higher-price, higher-quota mobile data service in order to get the Freemium service. We’re seeing more and more of this approach, especially in conjunction with LTE service offers. For example, in the early days of Verizon Wireless’ LTE roll-out, it offered a free 1-year subscription to NFL Mobile Premium to drive subscriber upgrades from 3G to its LTE data plans and smartphones / Mi-Fi devices. Now, with the adoption of LTE services well underway, Verizon Wireless is leveraging its significant investment in NFL content rights by offering NFL Mobile Premium as a Freemium service to users who opt for one of its new “More Everything” pricing plans. In many markets where mobile data usage is low, some operators have taken to offering “zero-rated” usage of popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter for a period of time, usually 6 to 12 months, during which the data used does not count towards the subscriber’s monthly quota. The goal of this approach is to get the user accustomed to using these services over mobile so that he or she subscribes to a data plan at the end of the Freemium period.

2.) Entice users to eventually pay a premium for a more Read More »

Tags: data plan, freemium, LTE, mobile, mobile operator, mobility, wi-fi

For the past 125 years, Globe University has focused on hands-on training to ensure the career success of students offering associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees, as well as diploma and certificate programs.  A recent article from the magazine Campus Technology showcases how they are pioneers in adopting new technology in the classroom. They have a systematic program dubbed as edUX (Educational User Experience) to integrate tablets into every program they offer. In addition, they work with an e-book platform called VitalSource and use Blackboard technology in the classrooms. Students are also encouraged to use technology. For example, math and science instructors use videos from the Khan Academy, the business school recommends Twitter accounts and the librarian encourages using EasyBib for book citations.

In the past few years Apple introduced mDNS services such as AppleTV, file servers and printers that use a Zero Config-based technology for service advertisement and discovery called Bonjour. While this technology works well in the home, which is a flat L2 network, when it is deployed in a K-12 or enterprise, it does not lend well over a L3 network. In 2013, Cisco introduced Bonjour Services Directory on the AireOS 7.4 and Service Discovery Gateway (SDG) on the Catalyst 3K, 4K, 6K and 5760 Series controllers with release IOS-XE 3.3. The future releases further optimized the functionality in 7.5 release, 8.0 release and IOS-XE 3.6 release. In this blog, I will share deployment details of unified access at Globe University and how they use Application Visibility and Control (Cisco AVC) to track applications in their network and the Bonjour Services Directory to manage AppleTVs in the classroom.

Read More »

Tags: access point, AP, Cisco, controller, edtech, education, higher education, Khan Academy, LAN, mobility, network, online learning, technology, technology in the classroom, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wlan