WiFi and the return of unlimited data plans

WiFi and the return of unlimited data plans

There is an ever-surging appetite for data consumption in Asean, which comes as operators become better equipped to deliver faster mobile connectivity.

The government hosted a recent exhibition on smart cities. PATTARAPONG CHATPATTARASILL
The government hosted a recent exhibition on smart cities. PATTARAPONG CHATPATTARASILL

Unlimited data plans, common in the early years of the smartphone era, are making a comeback now that carriers are better equipped to deliver faster mobile connectivity, says Vasudevan Venkatakrishnan, director for business development at Ruckus Networks Asia-Pacific.

In Malaysia, for example, mobile operator upstart Webe offers a no-contract postpaid plan with unlimited data, voice and text starting at just 632 baht a month.

The return of unlimited data plans comes at a time when rising demand for high-bandwidth content-driven services like Netflix and Spotify are driving impressive growth in data traffic. In Asia-Pacific, the growth in data consumption will be 30-60% per year from 2015 to 2020, driven by rich content, big data analytics, smart cities, social media and growing broadband penetration in the region.

Making unlimited data feasible

The ever-growing appetite for data is particularly acute in Asean, as the region is the fastest-growing internet market in the world, with its online population expanding by 124,000 new users every day. This is also the estimated growth rate in the next five years.

With increasing data generation and consumption, cellular networks might not able to cope with demand for data, especially in growing developing markets like Indonesia, and the challenge will become greater once unlimited data plans are back in place, Mr Venkatakrishnan said.

The use of WiFi technologies is one of the best options to deliver on end-user broadband needs, since it lets operators effectively manage both capital and operating expenditures by tightly integrating LTE and WiFi.

"By having a high-quality managed WiFi service to augment mobile networks, service providers can ensure quality of service is maintained, which positively affects customer retention," Mr Venkatakrishnan said. "In turn, costs are kept in check, as customer acquisition costs tend to be high."

The UN estimated that in 2016, 1.7 billion people, or 23% of the world's population, lived in a city with at least 1 million people. By 2030, that number is projected to rise to 27%.

Closer to home, the population of Asean is predicted to increase from 633 million people in 2015 to 741 million people in 2035, and the share of its ageing population is expected to nearly double over the next two decades, from 7.7% in 2015 to 15.5% in 2035.

To address the region's rapid urbanisation and ageing population, these countries will invest US$600 billion in infrastructure between 2010 and 2020.

To tackle the major challenges that urbanisation brings, smart cities have been built from the ground up to embrace connectivity. In these cities, everything from buildings to street lights is connected to each other and to the internet, via WiFi.

Digitising cities through WiFi

For older cities, WiFi technologies can be used to replace fixed lines and copper cables, enabling the population to stay connected whatever their device or location. This is especially pertinent because public spaces are often subject to regulations that restrict cellular coverage indoors, paving the way for WiFi to be optimal in highly frequented public spaces such as shopping malls and airports.

In Singapore, the Land Transport Authority rolled out WiFi connectivity in the island state's Mass Rapid Transit stations with the Wireless@SG program, which lets users stay online during their commute. WiFi hotspots also play a critical role in crowd management strategy, encouraging crowd displacement to areas with better connectivity. More importantly, data collected from the hotspots can produce insights to improve public transport service delivery.

In Malaysia, Kota Kinabalu recently launched KK City WiFi, Malaysia's first free WiFi-enabled city initiative. This programme is a crucial step in the city's ambition to become the nation's digital hub and is expected to boost the city's tourism, expand its digital economy and provide a platform for future e-government initiatives.

Urban connectivity also helps with data crowdsourcing to provide citizens access to information that would otherwise be hard to obtain. For example, Jakarta crowdsources social media data to help track floods and other natural disasters via the PetaBencana online service.

With smart cities, technology can play a role in building better communities, empowering social transformation through better efficiency and adapting to residents' needs. Whether through public transport systems or sustainability initiatives, smart city technologies can help solve the challenges of ageing civic infrastructure and urban planning decisions that were not made with a long-term view, Mr Venkatakrishnan said.

"For Southeast Asia, reaping the opportunities of a connected economy will require robust communications networks that deliver reliable connectivity to the millions of connected devices and sensors that keep our lives and cities running," he said.

Scale remains a challenge

Businesses and governments in Asia are looking seriously into the Internet of Things. According to a recent IDC report on IoT readiness, the IoT market for Asia-Pacific excluding Japan will grow from $335.6 billion in 2016 to $565.5 billion in 2020.

Without a doubt, IoT devices will continue to grow and play an increasingly large role in our lives and work environment. They will also track an ever-growing spectrum of data, ranging from health to location to transactional records. Many of these IoT devices will continue to carry sensitive data.

Securing IoT will continue to be a challenge because of the lack of secure mechanisms available for on-boarding and off-boarding. Moreover, IoT devices must maintain separate network policies not just against user client devices, but against themselves, as many device types and applications are in play.

Mr Venkatakrishnan said that even if these challenges can be addressed, the real issue is solving them at scale.

The best option for addressing security at scale is certificate-based WiFi security. This type of IoT on-boarding lets manufacturers easily enable secure IoT devices in days or weeks rather than months.

Once IoT devices are secured in this manner, the next step is to better enable IT managers to control and manage network privileges.

"This will vastly simplify the adoption of secure IoT devices at scale," Mr Venkatakrishnan said.

In order to work correctly, on-boarding technology must have the capability to apply specific policies to specific devices and enable the same network to discern between different users and devices. It must also be able to apply appropriate policies on every discrete connection on the network.

"This will result in mission-critical devices being treated as priority in a hierarchy of permissions that can be customised to individual demands," Mr Venkatakrishnan said.

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