Syniverse Makes Splash at Wireless Global Congress with Marketplace Café

Wi-Fi is big, getting bigger, and soon will represent the majority of the world’s internet traffic. Just consider that, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, by 2021, a whopping 50% of all internet traffic (fixed and mobile) will be Wi-Fi, while 30% will be wired and 20% will be mobile. On top of that, from 2016 to 2021, the number of public Wi-Fi hotspots is expected to grow six-fold – from 94 million to an amazing 541 million.

Without a doubt, data connectivity is more of a must than ever for mobile users at any moment or location, and these users continue to look to those of us in the tech industry to make Wi-Fi even more available and easier to connect to.

Syniverse recently had an opportunity to do just that when we attended Wireless Global Congress London last month. The highlight of our attendance was a new interactive exhibit we hosted called Marketplace Café, and one that will play a big part in transforming the way we serve our customers as well as our presence at trade shows. Here’s a look at what we did.

Marketplace Café
Wireless Global Congress is an annual conference held by the Wireless Broadband Alliance that brings together over 700 leaders from mobile service providers, equipment manufacturers, industry organizations, and other tech players to explore next-generation mobile service opportunities. It’s a big event for us each year and one that builds on our long relationship with the Wireless Broadband Alliance.

This year, we decided to take our presence to a new level by creating an open-concept lounge called Marketplace Café, named after our Syniverse Marketplace line of products. Marketplace Café offered  attendees an innovation and demonstration area where they could to stop by to catch some of the Wireless Global Congress events, have coffee and snacks, and hold quick meetings and networking sessions. We also offered visitors the opportunity to learn more about Syniverse and see some demos of our Syniverse Marketplace for Wi-Fi product in action as well as other Syniverse Marketplace products.

To build some buzz for the Café, we also had an iPad giveaway where everyone who registered to be a part of the Syniverse Marketplace network was entered for a drawing to win a new iPad. This was promoted by a multi-week social media campaign before and during Wireless Global Congress.

The Café concept was a hit! We made a number of new connections, introduced our solutions to dozens of attendees, and created an inviting environment for professionals to meet and exchange insights. The concept builds on the Innovation Theater we designed for Mobile World Congress Americas a few months ago and one we look forward to expanding on in the future. We hope you can experience it at one of our upcoming events soon!

“Ever wished you could bring e-commerce efficiencies into your business?”
The demos of our Syniverse Marketplace at the Café tied in with another big moment at Wireless Global Congress, when Dan Klaeren, our Senior Product Management Director and Wi-Fi services leader, made a presentation called “Ever wished you could bring e-commerce efficiencies into your business?”

Dan focused on the fact that, despite a number of favorable conditions and predictions, Wi-Fi roaming still hasn’t reached its full potential because of a single business challenge: wholesale Wi-Fi procurement continues to be unnecessarily difficult.

Among other challenges, the process for establishing a successful bilateral agreement between Wi-Fi sellers and buyers involves a long and painstaking process that can sometimes take up to a year to complete. This is the result of a number of technical, business, financial and legal steps that have to be resolved.

However, an approach that we’ve been refining at Syniverse through our Syniverse Marketplace solutions offers a way forward with this. It’s built around a centralized, user-friendly approach that is designed for telecom companies, service providers, and other businesses to consolidate all their searching and vetting of prospective partners into a single user-friendly process.

With this one-stop shop, they can buy and sell Wi-Fi – and many other mobile services – with the click of just a few buttons and eliminate much of the cumbersome process of having to manage wholesale agreements that require buyers and sellers to navigate the intricacies of determining coverage, pricing, legal requirements, and technical specifications.

We’re off to a promising start with using Syniverse Marketplace for Wi-Fi to help our customers, and we see it as a model that will greatly improve the tech industry’s ability to provide Wi-Fi more efficiently. And with Syniverse Marketplace and our new Marketplace Café concept, we’re looking forward to building on this experience at Wireless Global Congress and using our solutions to play a key role in enabling this next chapter of Wi-Fi.