The recent spate of announcements from the WiFi community could be interpreted as a defensive reaction to the rapid advance of 5G, especially when they are based on speculative forecasts of future economic impact. There is little doubt that WiFi has been forced to respond, not just in performance but also crucially manageability, which has been an Achilles’ heel for some time that has dogged fixed broadband operators.
Efforts to improve manageability have focused not just on WiFi itself but also interworking with cellular and increasingly 5G. This marks a return of the venerable and partially discredited automatic WiFi offload that enjoyed a brief heyday around six years ago and is now being seen as critical for coexistence in many public venues and enterprise sites, even if many of these stand empty at the moment during the covid-19 pandemic. Interworking therefore featured in the major upgrade package unveiled in September 2020 for WiFi Certified Vantage, the certification program to identify and select devices providing an elevated WiFi experience in managed networks.
This upgraded program supporting the latest generation WiFi 6/6E has since provided a springboard for efforts to gain traction in areas of dense user population in public areas, including stadia, airports, shopping malls, campuses and corporate offices. It perhaps encouraged the bullish forecast of economic impact just published by the WiFi Alliance, suggesting that the global economic surplus value of WiFi will soar at an average 150% per year from $3.3 trillion in 2021 to $4.9 trillion in 2025. This economic value was stated as including use of WiFi by consumers, businesses and service providers.
While we may be skeptical of such studies that assume global growth will quickly resume its previous trajectory post pandemic, as well as that WiFi’s efforts to address shortcomings will be wholly successful, we do anticipate growing coexistence with 5G in some of these public spaces. At any rate, such coexistence will be critical and we can see why so much effort has been expended in addressing manageability in general.
For while the major performance and capacity improvements that came along first with WiFi 6 and then the 6E extension into 6 GHz spectrum are indeed essential, it is the manageability that is perhaps even more critical at this stage of wireless evolution. Both operators and users now demand ubiquitous access to the internet wherever they are without noticeable decline in performance.
WiFi emerged over a decade ago as a thorn in the side for broadband operators as their help desks were increasingly bombarded by questions and complaints relating to that last wireless hop, rather than the fixed service to the router that they had come to assume was the end point for their domain of responsibility.
They increasingly attempted to contain the problem by issuing repeaters to boost the signal around the home, while various vendors came up with software to help monitor performance or troubleshoot. The likes of AirTies came up with wireless mesh technologies that improved throughput, availability and coverage, while the WiFi Alliance jumped on board with its certification program. At the same time, growing demand for continual internet access from roaming mobile devices, especially smartphones, created the initial groundswell behind WiFi offload, also motivated by desire on the part of MNOs to reduce congestion on their own networks.
That drive from MNOs eased as more capacity came onstream, but now demand is coming from back from the WiFi side as it would allow continual access to services in and around many public venues, as well as campuses and enterprise sites.
This has all condensed into what Kevin Robinson, senior vice president of marketing, Wi-Fi Alliance, describes as the “four key pillars of a positive WiFi experience in dynamic environments”. These are manageability, mobility, performance, and security. “Key mechanisms in WiFi Vantage make WiFi increasingly suited for scenarios requiring greater mobility and aid a higher-quality experience, which today often includes frequent transitions between WiFi and cellular networks,” said Robinson at the launch of the upgraded package.
This new emphasis on smoothing the transition between WiFi and cellular is significant, and has been hammered home repeatedly by WiFi advocates such as Claus Hetting, CEO and chairman of WiFi Now, a WiFi events, news and advisory organization. He recently argued that “the case for a resurgence in auto-connect WiFi offload (or convergence) will strengthen, which in turn will render Passpoint functionality even more essential”.
As evidence, he pointed to Google’s Orion WiFi program launched in September 2020, designed to enable smaller venues such as local stores or cafes to enable and make money from WiFi offload in their own domains. The novel aspect was the monetization, enabling such venues to extract small payments via Google’s platform from MNOs for donating their WiFi networks to consumers while they are indoors and perhaps not able to obtain a good mobile signal, or to benefit from faster access.
Subscribing customers use their own Google account to set up their own WiFi network for the scheme. It is not quite clear that how successful this latest attempt to extract payments from operators for the WiFi capacity their subscribers utilize will be, but it does underline the resurgence in coexistence, or even heterogenous networking as it was once called.
It is important, though, not to relegate the importance of performance measures within the Passpoint program, with various optimization and acceleration features such as the WiFi Alliance’s ‘WiFi Agile Multiband’ and ‘WiFi Optimized Connectivity’ umbrellas.
These include techniques originally pioneered by various vendors through proprietary techniques, such as intelligent band and AP (access point) steering, which connect users to the channel and AP offering the best capacity and availability at the time. Without such capabilities, connections might default to the nearest AP and a band that happens to be available, either 2.5 GHz, 5 GHz or now 6 GHz with WiFi 6E.
There are also features for smoother roaming within the WiFi domain and faster network discovery. These various features were designed particularly for service areas such as those venues with high density and influx of users. There is evidence they work, for example in a survey conducted by the cable TV industry group CableLabs reporting a 76% decrease in average connectivity setup time when such measures are deployed.
A more recent enhancement especially relevant in the current context during the pandemic is uplink Multiuser-MIMO, which speeds uploading of video from homes, incidence of which has increased greatly over the last year. MU-MIMO came in with WiFi 5, but only recently for uplinks as well as downlinks. Qualcomm has taken MU-MIMO further than required for conformance with WiFi 6 standard by doubling WiFi data capacity from 990Mbps to nearly 2.4Gbps for 8-stream MU-MIMO.