The Pragmatic Innovator

Off-Hour WiFi Offload: Capacity Crunch Silver Bullet?

There has been much discussion recently about the merits of off-hour WiFi offload.

As mentioned in this recent Computerworld article, “Sony, SanDisk and several other technology providers have formed a group and proposed a standard that would use predictive software to pre-load content onto mobile devices in order to preempt buffering issue due to bandwidth bottlenecks.”

Sounds promising, right?  But how exactly are these providers planning to “pre-load content?”  After digging a little bit deeper, it became apparent that they were planning to use a technique called off-hour WiFi offloading, which at first glance might seem comparable to content pre-positioning, which is utilized by our NetRover platform.

After a quick comparison, however, several significant differences between the two technologies emerge.  While both concepts aim to deliver content to a mobile device without burdening the network, consider the following:

• For off-hour WiFi offloading to work, there a multitude of requirements, including the availability of a WiFi network, the proper configuration of device settings and adequate smartphone battery life.
• In addition, latency is a significant issue as content cannot be delivered until the network provides a window of opportunity.  Many times, this means that content is not being delivered until the wee hours of the morning.
• Many wireless operators do not own WiFi networks. So selling consumers on new video-based services that require them not to work on their mobile networks is a hard sale. Wireless operators and consumers need media to work on 3G (and 4G) networks – not restrict it only to WiFi.

This stands in stark contrast to NetRover’s content pre-positioning technology, which “roves” the network day and night to identify and utilize surplus capacity.  In general, content pre-positioning is far more flexible than off-hour WiFi offloading as it is not dependant on WiFi and does not rely on a preconfigured schedule for content delivery.

Rather, content pre-positioning works on WiFi and 3G and continually works with the network to deliver content any time surplus capacity is identified.   No preconfigured schedule required.

We think users need mobile video delivery technologies that actually make life easier, not ones that mandate a plethora of requirements in order to work.  What do you think?