The biggest piece of Mosaik Solutions' business is its global wireless database. It has what it believes is the most comprehensive and most frequently updated database in the world. But it's also interested in helping the Wi-Fi industry develop more credibility when it comes to the location of access points.
The company recently partnered with BSG to support the growing Wi-Fi ecosystem, with the objective of improving the quality of a global Wi-Fi directory and creating a reliable source for the most accurate Wi-Fi location data.
For many years in the Wi-Fi space, Mosaik has been developing mapping and data management services for Wi-Fi network providers, and the new relationship with BSG takes that approach and combines their respective expertise to resolve a fairly substantial problem in the Wi-Fi space: building confidence in the location and information that's available about Wi-Fi access points globally, according to Chip Strange, vice president of products and technology at Mosaik.
One of the concerns relative to "carrier Wi-Fi" is mobile network operators are used to being able to stand behind their network brand, and it's difficult for some operators to trust Wi-Fi networks and incorporate them as aggressively as they can, both from a customer consciousness standpoint and for their own overall engineering confidence.
"We think that by creating a bit more certainty about the quality of Wi-Fi location data and what's called directory data… there's a big opportunity out there to try to solve this problem," which has been so big that it's almost been something people have been leery to take on or didn't think they had the time to delve into, he said.
The idea is that by increasing the confidence in the location of a specific business owner's access point or points, it will increase confidence in that business owner's ability to effectively get an operator's customers on its network when they're in the area. "It's not a silver bullet necessarily, but it is a piece of the puzzle that we believe is important," he said.
Mosaik also has a large tower database that it recently introduced. Throughout North America, it tracks spectrum down to a county level and strives for a level of granularity that others don't offer. Combining that spectrum data with the coverage database gives it a good sense of exactly where the operators are or are not using the spectrum they've licensed.
It also keeps up globally with band plans relative to LTE, but the spectrum market is far more complex in the United States than it is in most other nations due to national licensing deals. The company has steered clear of the TV white space database arena because it's somewhat outside its historical focus and some large entities quickly seized on that market.
For more:
- see this RCR Wireless News article
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