Increase in Wi-Fi Reliability

An article written in the Wall Street Journal recently talks about how a lot of people today are now dropping their smartphone bills and switching to a Wi-Fi only mobile strategy. When you think about going through life without a cell phone it would be completely impossible but it is now easier to go without having to deal with those pesky monthly bills. The article first breaks down how an everyday phone user was able to go about his daily routine normally by just using Wi-Fi. For 30 days he disconnected his phone and relied solely on Wi-Fi without many problems. Of course he ran into some when traveling and in buildings but it surprised him how easy it was to say connected. Today you can find Wi-Fi just about anywhere you go, from restaurants, bars, malls, train stations, or just your friend’s house with the simple ask of a password.

Using solely Wi-Fi does have its downs along with the ups. Like I said before it is not close to reliable as using 4G or any other tower based networks. You can run into many problems such as connectivity when outdoors as well as indoors, disconnecting when roaming, and not having available hotspots all of the time. The biggest risk I see if you were to commit to this strategy would be security issues. There are multiple tactics for hackers to gain your information while you are imputing usernames and passwords, using mobile banking services, accessing social media and email, as well as online shopping. One tactic that hackers are using these days is called “man-in-the-middle” attacks where they can inject themselves in between computers and modify the connections to their advantage. Another tactic is for hackers to set up rogue networks to mask themselves as legit networks to have you imputing information directly into their hands. 

Even though these risks are present people are still using public Wi-Fi networks more than ever. Verizon and AT&T put out their wireless revenue statistics recently and they have added collectively 8.8 million mainstream subscribers to their system, almost three million more than last year. The reason these numbers are on such a rise is because of the increase in hotspots that provides are supplying their customers today. Google and Apple are some of the largest supporters of this upward trend that our society is moving to today. Mainstream Apps like Google voice and imessage make it simpler to communicate over Wi-Fi. These large companies do not have a problem with these implements of communication because they know there will always be a market for who wants reliable connection. Break through companies such as iPass and Devicescape are also hopping on this bandwagon providing strings of hotspots across the country with a small fee to counter the problem of sporadic hotspots in populated areas. So do you think that we will start to see these larger cellphone carriers adapting to this trend of our increasing Wi-Fi reliability? I predict that we will see some changes to their policies in the near future.