Business value of Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi has become ubiquitous today for connecting mobiles, tablets and laptops to the internet. Since its inception in 1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance (http://www.wi-fi.org/) has been primarily promoting both technology and business advancements in Wi-Fi for internet access. The speed of Wi-Fi access points has increased 100 times from its 11 Mbps speed in 1999 to over a Gbps now.
Wi-Fi has become ubiquitous today for
connecting mobiles, tablets and laptops to the internet. Since its inception in
1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance (http://www.wi-fi.org/) has been primarily promoting
both technology and business advancements in Wi-Fi for internet access. The
speed of Wi-Fi access points has increased 100 times from its 11 Mbps speed in
1999 to over a Gbps now.
The number of public Wi-Fi hotspots has
almost doubled from 3.3. million in 2013 to more than 6 million now; the number
of private hotspots has seen tremendous growth to more than 700 million today.
However, apart from providing raw internet connectivity, Wi-Fi can also be used
as a powerful business communication channel. Wi-Fi is hyper local as the
technology is intended to cover about 100-300 feet from the access point.
Proximity has become a critical element of today’s mobile connected experiences,
and the market for proximity-based applications is expected to grow
significantly in 2016 and beyond.
Wi-Fi Direct that allows direct connectivity
between Wi-Fi devices and Wi-Fi Aware that enables devices to connect based on
context, proximity and interest without the need for global positioning system
(GPS) or mobile connectivity are being promoted by the Wi-Fi Alliance to better
utilise the power of Wi-Fi. On the other hand, enterprises of today are moving
from single channel (in-store or online) to omni-channel (online-offline) sales
and marketing, especially in retail businesses. By using the power of Wi-Fi,
retail stores can provide store branding, product promotion, loyalty
programmes, cross and up selling of merchandise and much more to the customers
who walk in to their stores, clutching their smartphones.
The communication also can be personalised
with minimal effort. Continuous customer feedback collection, which is one of
the major pain points for retail businesses, can be elicited using simple forms
or chats over Wi-Fi. A wealth of information thus collected can be used to
improve merchandise stocking, innovate on pricing policies, and improve
customer experience. Though retail industry tried a variation of this using
Bluetooth technology, due to its intrusive nature and complexity of set up, it
is not really catching on.
It is time for the brick-and-mortar companies
to latch on to this simple but powerful technology to outwit their e-commerce
counterparts. Though one can argue that such omni-channel experience can be
provided through a mobile app, the app space is
getting cluttered. The number of mobile apps in Google Play Store is more than 1.6 million. With constraints
in memory and storage space in mobile devices, the stickiness of apps is very
poor especially in India. Wi-Fi provides a great opportunity for business to
connect with the proximal customers, without the need for developing a mobile
app and inducing its adoption which in itself is a difficult task. An add-on
could be internet connectivity!
The Indian telcos have been laggards in
adopting Wi-Fi to complement their mobile service. Off late, realising the cost
effectiveness of Wi-Fi, the mobile operators in India have started deploying
Wi-Fi hotspots for data off-loading. With the technology advantages offered by
Wi-Fi Direct and Wi-Fi Aware, it is time that joint partnerships are formed
between system integrators, telcos and B2C enterprises to deploy Wi-Fi based
networks and systems such that customers get personalised proximal information,
and economic data off-loading; enterprises get customer attention; and telcos
benefit through data offloading and save their precious mobile network
capacity.
Source | Financial Express | 26 May 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Best
Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
Note | If anybody use these post for forwarding in any social media coverage
or covering in the Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking
efforts for the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment