Casting Doubts on the Viability of WiFi Offloading

With the advent of the Smartphone, mobile data usage has exploded which in turn has created tremendous pressure on cellular data networks. A promising candidate to reduce the impact of cellular data growth is Wi-Fi off-loading. However, recent data from their study of two hundred student Smartphone users casts doubts on the reductions that can be gained from Wi-Fi off-loading. Despite the users operating in a dense university Wi-Fi environment, cellular consumption still dominated overall data usage. The authors believe the root cause of lesser Wi-Fi utilization can be traced to the Wi-Fi being optimized for laptop Wi-Fi reception rather than the more constrained Smartphone Wi-Fi reception.