Commercial Wi-Fi and 4G networks will coexist for a long time

Commercial Wi-Fi and 4G networks will coexist for a long time

According to the latest research report recently released by yiguan think tank, although the current 4G development has a certain impact on the commercial Wi-Fi market, in the long term, the two have a complementary relationship.

The report shows that commercial WiFi in China has passed through the initial development stage. In the initial stage of commercial Wi-Fi development, carriers, commercial WiFi solution providers, and merchants provide commercial Wi-Fi networks through independent procurement, hardware installation, and self-built networks. This brings about problems such as high hardware purchase and maintenance costs and unstable network quality. At present, China's commercial Wi-Fi market is further mature, with the emergence of professional third-party operators, the "cloud + Terminal" operation model is used to provide higher-quality WiFi networks and additional services for merchants and individual users. The operation costs of merchants are reduced and the user experience is improved.

The report also pointed out that commercial WiFi in China is showing three major development trends.

First, the quality and functions of commercial WiFi will continue to be upgraded, and more application services will be connected. The improvement of commercial Wi-Fi service quality has benefited from the upgrade of market competition. Continuously improving user experience has become a necessary measure for commercial WiFi to obtain data and gain market share, commercial Wi-Fi manufacturers will continue to pay attention to the stability of their Wi-Fi networks and the improvement of the Internet access rate.

At the same time, commercial Wi-Fi features are upgraded and are no longer limited to network services. First, the laying of commercial Wi-Fi by merchants will help achieve O2O closed loop. Commercial WiFi will no longer be limited to providing simple networking services, and application services will become the next growth point. With the growth of WiFi network applications, the functions of WiFi will be more diversified. Secondly, commercial Wi-Fi network access service is the most basic service provided to users. Based on the capture of user behavior data on the wireless network, commercial Wi-Fi can obtain user data with more commercial values. Finally, for large commercial sites, through monitoring terminals connected to the AP, real-time monitoring and analysis of human traffic data in the sites can be performed.

Second, diversified profit models and value-added service revenues have become the main trend. With the accumulation of a large amount of user data, commercial Wi-Fi manufacturers will make more profits from user data processing and analysis services. At the same time, commercial Wi-Fi has become an important tool for merchants to improve their business efficiency and marketing efficiency. Commercial Wi-Fi vendors use value-added services, such as application services designed for efficient business operations on WiFi, this is the main direction of commercial Wi-Fi business models.

Third, market segments, but the scene value continues to rise, channels sink, and the market shows oligarchy. At present, as the number of entrants increases, the market competition will gradually lead to the elimination of enterprises with weak technical strength and poor operation ability, and the competition will become increasingly fierce. At the same time, as the number of enterprise hotspots increases, the marginal reduction of enterprise operation costs, enterprises with high-quality outlets will have a great advantage in the competition.

At the same time, different scenarios have different requirements for commercial Wi-Fi, and the commercial Wi-Fi market will be further subdivided Based on the Use scenario. The value of merchants covered by WiFi hotspots is becoming more and more important. The value of users reflects the value of WiFi traffic to a certain extent. The high-end merchant market will become the main competitor of WiFi manufacturers.

In addition, commercial Wi-Fi channels gradually sink. Currently, the commercial Wi-Fi market is mainly concentrated in the first-and second-tier cities. Commercial Wi-Fi networks are deployed at airports and railway stations with high traffic, and the market is saturated. It is foreseeable that the third-and fourth-tier cities will become the medium-and long-term growth point of commercial Wi-Fi in the future.