Case studySummary
At a time when internet access is increasingly perceived as a basic utility—on par with necessities such as water and electricity—the commercial market has failed to bring broadband to low-income, urban communities on a global scale and in particular in the Latam/Africa region.
The Streetwifi platform is a great step towards closing this gap, even on not leading-edge networks and many times onto legacy WiFi routers and not on the latest technology. But those are the stakes in this region: poor technology that will take many years to renew and millions of under-connected people.
Streetwifi has overcome most technological challenges, but along the way a rather more “human” challenge came across and needed to be addressed.
Highlights
- Billions of people under-connected or not connected at all
- Legacy technology that does not support the latest Open WiFi standards
- Millions of potential access points that could be providing WiFi to billions of people
The challenge
WiFi is becoming the basic building block of modern communications. Runs on an unlicensed frequency on a global scale, its performance improves year after year, offers the best price-performance ratio and supports a wide range of business models.
Everyone understands very easily and very fast the opportunity of getting extra juice out of existing infrastructure. Making additional revenue with close-to-zero CAPEX investment is a no-brainer decision for most ISPs.
But when the moment of implementing emerges, some fears come along as well:
Will community WiFi affect in some way the current service provided to my residential subscribers?
Will this skyrocket customer assistance calls?
How will my commercial brand name be affected?
These and many other questions are natural reactions in all new implementations, particularly when referring to a value-added service aimed at large communities.
Potential access points in Latam
(millions)
The solution
- An independent SSID and network hosted by Streetwifi
- Works like an ATM network
- The ISP’s brand name is not exposed
- The ISP gets to develop a private Open WiFi for its own subscribers
- Particular services, plans or benefits can be tailored to the ISP’s own subscribers whilst not limiting roaming capabilities through the Streetwifi network
Results
This innovative approach has provided a number of benefits to ISPs and the community:
Rapid deployment of the solution
All previous fears are quelled since the ISP brand name is not exposed
Everything falls onto Streetwifi
The ISP still gets its share of the revenue: it operates as a Host Network and Streetwifi as a Virtual Operator
Issues such as anonymization are better handled, providing seamless roaming across all ISPs in the network
Let's make something great together.
Balmoral 309, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile · hola@streetwifi.cl · +56 9 4429 9020 · streetwifi.cl