In the home, in the enterprise, in public spaces and increasingly, in “Internet of Things” applications, WiFi has come to dominate how end users connect to the broader network as they seek good speed, throughput and low cost for their connections. For the first time in 2015, Wi-Fi carried more mobile network traffic than cellular networks. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index for mobile pegged the percentage as 51% of overall network traffic being offloaded from cellular to the wired network via Wi-Fi and femtocells.
That trend is only expected to continue, as by 2020, Cisco predicts mobile offload will increase to 55% of overall mobile data traffic, which at that point will mean about 38.1 exabytes per month, up from 3.9 exabytes per month in 2015. Wi-Fi is also stepping up its game through expanded features and capabilities. It’s expected that 802.11ac’s second wave of features will see Wi-Fi Alliance certification this year, with the first certified devices designed to support gigabit WiFi speeds – also known as WiGig or 802.11ad – set to appear this year as well. Wi-Fi also has a new standard specifically for IoT applications known as W-Fi HaLow. Meanwhile, vendors continue to push for expanded adoption of Wi-Fi Alliance’s Hotspot 2.0, commercially known as Passpoint, which enables seamless authentication to make Wi-Fi act more like cellular.
As Wi-Fi expands its features and reach though, the technology is also encountering new challenges. Its very popularity has resulted in major congestion in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band, and the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s 2015 annual report said some operators fear the unlicensed 5 GHz band could become intolerably congested in as little as two to three years. One of the biggest question marks is co-existence and how well Wi-Fi will fare on a continued convergence toward cellular, with the advent of LTE in unlicensed bands using License Assisted Access and LTE over Unlicensed – a question which industry players are trying hard to answer.
Future trends in Wi-Fi, including standards work; the controversy around LTE-U and potential impacts to Wi-Fi; spectrum issues; and the role the technology is likely to play for service providers in the home and other offload points, including monetization tactics based on analytics, services and IoT.
Extracted from: The future of the Wi-Fi by Kelly Hill
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