Saturday 9 November 2013

What are Homespots?

Recently I got introduced to the term 'Homespots'. While I knew what they are, I wasn't aware there was a term for them

The slide above and below are from a recent webinar by Maravedis-Rethink (embedded at the end of the post)


In UK we have BT FON and Openzone which are both Wi-Fi hotspot services. Openzone is actually a hotspot deployed and maintained by them while FON is actually a Homespot, which uses spare capacity from the open Home Hubs deployed in the homes. BT has some details about it here.


Anyfi whitepaper shows (see above pic) some of the technical challenges that need to be kept in mind while deploying Homespots.

Anyway, here is complete presentation from the webinar mentioned above



4 comments:

  1. Claus Hetting (via Seamless Wi-Fi offload group on Linkedin)10 November 2013 at 07:24

    'Homespots' is just about the only part of seamless Wi-Fi offload that everyone seem to agree works. It appears to be a widely accepted and well-functioning concept - although I have not seen specific offload measurements for it. It's also quite technically cheap and simple to implement - relatively speaking - so it's a fairly obvious thing to do.

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  2. Manoj Das (via Het Net group on Linkedin)10 November 2013 at 07:29

    Zahid, thanks for sharing. This is absolutely an excellent idea as long as ISP, MSP proposes this. Once any third party proposes this idea, it will be complicated. The residential user buys the band width from the ISP as an end user. opening up a hidden SSID for other users is like reselling the band width. Therefore the terms of usage would apply as a re-seller not as end user.

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  3. This works great when you either have an unlimited bandwidth service or you control the pipe such as an MSO, Fiber or DSL provider. In environments where you have capped limits or you pay by the byte, if the carrier doesn't provision a virtual pipe for its public service alongside the customers these guests can become real expensive real fast.

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  4. In metered markets this can be a real problem unless its a service offered by the owner of the pipe and they provision a parallel virtual line that segregates the public from the private.

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