Devicescape, the leader in device WiFi, today shared key information making a rock-solid business case for service providers to offload their data-intensive traffic to the Devicescape Virtual WiFi Network. The data presented by Devicescape illustrates how service providers can significantly reduce their capital and operating expenditure by offloading data-intensive traffic to the Devicescape Virtual WiFi Network, while at the same time offering their customers the many advantages of using Devicescape software.

Thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones, tablets and mobile apps, data usage has skyrocketed. While these new technologies have arguably made our lives richer, the fact remains that mobile data is a huge problem for operators. Data usage has grown dramatically, doubling last year in North America alone, for example, but data revenue has not kept pace, forcing service providers to scramble to contain costs. In many markets, data has grown so much that it has saturated the cellular network, grossly impacting the quality of service. Fallout from this saturation includes dropped calls and difficulty using data-intensive applications.

It’s true that newer networks like 4G and LTE will help cut costs and expand current capacity, but the data needs we see today are merely the tip of the iceberg. There is a very real possibility that latent demand will be close to 100 times the capacity used today. Despite marketing claims of high performance, any new network can be very easily saturated. After all, cellular spectrum is a finite resource. Given this, service providers must act now to prepare for the onslaught.

Devicescape maintains that WiFi is the mobile data offload game-changer, and, through collaboration with a few service providers working with the company, offers a number of facts mined from a sampling of 1 million devices offloading data to the Devicescape Virtual WiFi Network over the course of a month:

• Each handset performed an average of eight WiFi sessions a day or 240 in a month, averaging an offload of 40 percent.
• Most high-usage devices saw rates as high as 80 percent.
• The aggregate data offload was more than 100MB per device per month a total of 100 terabytes.