Cisco & Qualcomm Highlight Real-World Benefits of New Wi-Fi Standards

Given the ubiquity of the technology, it’s easy to forget how essential Wi-Fi continues to be, especially in enterprise environments. In fact, as Wi-Fi celebrates its 25^th anniversary this year, wireless connectivity is now at the very core of how we’re all used to working. As a result, organizations who want to ensure that their employees stay as productive as possible understand that they need to keep their Wi-Fi implementations up to date.

This point became very clear during a roundtable discussion I hosted at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona with representatives from Cisco, Qualcomm and the Fira Barcelona—the location and organization that hosts the annual trade show. The wide range of topics we addressed in the roundtable covered everything from the benefits of 6 GHz spectrum (first introduced in Wi-Fi6E and further refined in Wi-Fi7), to new kinds of applications that are possible when Wi-Fi networks are used as a collection of sensors.

What was particularly interesting was the different perspectives that panel participants brought to the discussion. As a supplier of the key semiconductor components that go into Wi-Fi routers, Qualcomm’s Ganesh Swaminathan, the VP and General Manager of the company’s Wireless Networking Business, offered several insights regarding the ongoing development of the Wi-Fi standard as well as some of the key technologies that enable it. Cisco’s Yogesh Paliwal, Director of Product Management for Cisco Wireless, who sells Cisco and Meraki-branded products that integrate Qualcomm chips, brought up multiple points about the many types of applications that the latest versions of Wi-Fi can enable. Finally, as the end customer, Fira Barcelona’s Telecommunications Manager Tony Montis Palos, gave a real-world perspective on the types of challenges that organizations like his face and how the latest Wi-Fi products are helping to solve them.

One of the first points that came up in the discussion was that Wi-Fi had essentially become a victim of its own success. Because of the enormous demands that were being placed on Wi-Fi, networks started to get clogged with traffic. As a result, companies were looking for ways to expand both the number of devices they could support on a given network and the speed of the connections to those devices. Tony Montis of the Fira made the point quite succinctly by noting that they had started deploying Cisco Wi-Fi routers based on the Wi-Fi4 standard in 2010 and at this year’s conference they were using 1,700 interconnected routers, most of which were leveraging the Wi-Fi6 standard. Within that group were about 60 new routers based on Wi-Fi6E and the 6 GHz band (and 1.2 GHz of additional spectrum) it provides. As he explained, the Fira needs to supply the Wi-Fi connections for attendees as well as separate networks for exhibitors and that’s where the extra channels and capacity made available via the latest Wi-Fi standards become extremely important.

When it comes to the evolution of Wi-Fi technology, Qualcomm’s Ganesh Swaminathan described how those developments are driven by evolving applications needs. In particular, he noted the desire for lower latency, higher bandwidth and higher density on Wi-Fi networks led to the key advancements that Qualcomm integrated into their latest Wi-Fi chips. Cisco’s Yogesh Paliwal picked up on that theme and described the real-world implications of meeting these demands for things like SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and business models. He pointed out that organizations like Fira Barcelona and other companies typically sign agreements with their customers that stipulate a certain quality of service. If those standards aren’t met, there can be a real-world monetary impact. Without the kinds of improvements in capacity and real-time communications that the latest versions of Wi-Fi can enable, those performance levels just aren’t possible. Plus, with deployments of new technologies, some facilities and other organizations can actually garner a price premium for certain areas by offering even better performance as the result of how and where the network technology is deployed.

Yogesh also described a Virtual Reality (VR) application that was transformed thanks to the speed of Wi-Fi6E. Before the technology was deployed, the company who created the experience required individuals to wear a backpack that held the compute device powering the VR display. The reason was because the latency involved in sending data over the network to the connected display was too long to allow an acceptable experience. Once Wi-Fi6E routers were installed, however, the backpack was no longer required, and the experience was much more pleasant.

Moving the discussion onto Wi-Fi7, it was noted that this iteration is bringing cellular-like technologies to Wi-Fi, such as carrier aggregation and multi-link operation, which helps improve both the speed and reliability of Wi-Fi connections. As a result of this, Qualcomm’s Ganesh Swaminathan said, one of the key benefits of Wi-Fi7 is that it can improve the performance over existing 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. (Wi-Fi7 can also add these benefits to 6 GHz, but that isn’t the only band to benefit from these improvements). This is important because not all countries have released 6 GHz spectrum.

For places where unlicensed 6 GHz spectrum is available for Wi-Fi applications, such as the US and Canada, it’s important to take advantage of the full 1.2 GHz spectrum that it opens up. This is being done with options for both wider 320 MHz channels as well as significantly more smaller bandwidth channels in a dense, cellular-like approach. Another key advantage for Wi-Fi7 across all radio spectrum is a technology referred to as adaptive interference. Instead of just dropping a connection when interference becomes an issue, the preamble puncturing technology used in Wi-Fi7 can essentially work around the interference.

According to Tony Montis of Fira Barcelona, these types of technologies should increase the reliability of Wi-Fi7 and that, in turn, allows more critical services to be moved to Wi-Fi connections, opening up new avenues for both application development and monetization.

Yogesh Paliwal of Cisco also talked about the potential of using Wi-Fi6, 6E and 7 outdoors for outdoor applications. In addition, by configuring these outdoor connections as extensions of indoor networks, you can enable technologies like Open Roaming, which can seamlessly connect devices across Wi-Fi networks and even between some 5G and Wi-Fi networks automatically. Using a technology called Automatic Frequency Coordination (AFC), which Qualcomm’s Ginesh Swaminathan explained was like a simpler form of CBRS technology used in cellular networks, you could both support higher power transmission of 6 GHz Wi-Fi signals and still easily coexist with other incumbent applications that are currently using 6 GHz spectrum for other purposes.

On the more intriguing applications of Wi-Fi that’s starting to be deployed with these newer versions is location-based services. As the Fira’s Tony Montis explained, they built an application called Smart Venue that used the network’s 1,700 Cisco Wi-Fi access points as sensors that listened to what was happening on the network. From that, they could do things like track how people are moving from building to building, check the temperature and air quality, and even have real-time tracking of security personnel in the event an emergency in part of the complex required their immediate attention.

Finally, when the topic of Wi-Fi vs. 5G was broached, all three participants made it clear that coexistence between the two technologies is key. One technology doesn’t replace the other but rather compliments it. For example, when there are large outdoor areas that need wireless coverage, a private 5G network is likely a more cost-effective solution, but it only gains its full value if it’s linked with the Wi-Fi network in the same area.

The bottom line is that as we celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Wi-Fi, it’s worth noting how far the technology has come for business applications. Even better, it’s clear that its evolution is far from over. There are many improvements and additions still to come that promise to keep Wi-Fi an integral part of how we work and communicate for some time to come.

(If you’d like to see a recording of the roundtable, you can find a link to the video below.)

Disclosure: TECHnalysis Research is a tech industry market research and consulting firm and, like all companies in that field, works with many technology vendors as clients, some of whom may be listed in this article.