Study: Poor management of Wi-Fi assets could cost operators $18 Billion in lost revenue

Startup XCellAir is trying to drive home the point to carriers that they might want to take a closer look at how they're managing Wi-Fi. According to research released during the week of Sept 21, operators collectively could be leaving up to $18 billion on the table by failing to properly manage unregulated spectrum.

The study, which also highlights XCellAir's relevancy in the current debate over LTE in unlicensed spectrum and the forthcoming Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) standard, was conducted in partnership with Real Wireless. It showed that poor management of Wi-Fi assets severely limits their usefulness in dense urban areas where many access points are deployed to serve large numbers of users and large volumes of data. Interference between access points and minimal spectral management often result in sub-optimal experiences for users, they noted. XCellAir, which came out of stealth mode earlier in 2015, conducted an analysis of 250 live Wi-Fi access points around its offices in Montreal, Canada, modeling common urban scenarios in which public Wi-Fi is in everyday use. The study revealed that 92 percent of access points do not adjust their operating frequency, no matter how badly performance is degraded by interference.