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Cape Town - It's in the interests of businesses to roll out free Wi-Fi as the provision of internet services could help stimulate more revenue for the enterprise concerned, says an insider.
"From a commercial perspective, offering free Wi-Fi is a powerful consumer draw card, which sees increased traffic within and around the store," said Andre Bezuidenhout, CEO of Ctrlroom.
In SA, the rollout of higher speed LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile networks has been hamstrung by a lack of political will to move terrestrial television broadcasters out of the key 800MHz spectrum required for mobile broadband.
According to the Draft National Broadband Policy, the challenge of fourth generation mobile spectrum has hindered the development of broadband.
"Institutional challenges associated with spectrum allocation, together with delays in the migration of analogue terrestrial broadcasting to digital, have meant that service innovation, increased competition, potential job opportunities and tax revenues have not been realised," the document says.
Digital divide
However, the connectivity vacuum is likely to be met by Wi-Fi.
President Jacob Zuma said in his State of the Nation Address that internet infrastructure was a national priority.
"We will expand, modernise and increase the affordability of information and communications infrastructure and electronic communication services, including broadband and digital broadcasting," Zuma said.
Municipal and provincial Wi-Fi projects are aimed at bringing a larger share of the population access to internet services.
Modern smartphones with apps that deliver rich media content have a higher data consumption than feature phones. (Duncan Alfreds, Fin24)
The City of Tshwane leads the country with a mammoth Wi-Fi access network and the Western Cape Provincial government on Monday launched a road show for its Wi-Fi projects in Atlantis, George and Robertson.
The project forms part of the province's R1.3bn broadband rollout plan and is aimed at connecting 50 000 people to the internet.
Bezuidenhout said that businesses that offered free Wi-Fi could engage with a captive audience, which had positive implications for increasing revenue.
"Two of the biggest benefits for rolling out Wi-Fi for commercial purposes are to generate alternative revenue and to develop market reach and brand affinity."
Data appetite
He warned though, that the service has to be useful. In a number of cases, an establishment might offer free Wi-Fi that requires an extensive and unnecessarily complicated sing-up process and caps users at 20MB, for example.
This is contrary to what is offered internationally. In many countries in Asia, near unlimited Wi-Fi is a standard for many enterprises.
"For example, offering 15MB for free isn't going to get users onto a network, or allow them to extract any real value from it. It's paramount that the user's experience with the Wi-Fi service is simple and efficient, or massive dropouts are to be expected. A business may have the best intentions of providing free Wi-Fi, but if the user interface isn't clear, few people will use it," said Bezuidenhout.
He said that government-sponsored free Wi-Fi was a component in increasing the reputation of the country and could help with service delivery in key areas.
"Free Wi-Fi has been deployed for the following reasons: It allows the government to potentially gain a deeper understanding of the population in isolated pockets; it increases public service offering; it enhances the reputation of South Africa and its government as progressive-thinking; it increases the appeal of areas to tourists, and it bridges the digital divide and the lines of inequality."
According to data from Ericsson's Mobile Data Traffic Growth report for 2013 to 2019, the Sub-Saharan region's data appetite is huge and expected to grow at 65% to 2019 and beyond.
Put into perspective, mobile data in the region was at 37 000 terabytes (TB) per month in 2013, and that will jump to 76 000TB by the end of 2014, on its way to a mammoth 764 000TB by the end of 2019.
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