Wi-Fi: Future Roadmap and LTE

At the WBA Wi-Fi Global Congress, Intel provided a good summary of the way things are progressing in the WiFi world, including the standards updates that are going on. Luckily I found a video by the same author in from an IEEE conference which is also embedded below.

Wi-Fi is becoming important and a useful rule of thumb is that the spectrum in 5GHz is roughly around 10 times that of 2.4GHz and the spectrum is 60GHz is roughly around 10 times that of 5GHz. (not all spectrum is available everywhere so just use this as a rough guide).


As I mentioned in a presentation I gave this week, there are three different approaches being proposed at the radio level; LTE-U, LAA and LWA. I wrote a post on LWA not long back on the 3G4G blog here.



Dave Wright from Ruckus Wireless has kindly shared a recent presentation on different proposals for LTE operation in unlicensed spectrum. The timeline above shows how quickly things are moving. Here is a the presentation

It would be important from Wi-Fi vendors point of view that LTE-WiFI Link Aggregation is standardised as part of Release-13 as there would be an option which would be agreeable to everyone.

HetNet Strategies with Oi Brazil

Brazil has been in limelight since the beginning of the year. Initially, the focus was on how the FIFA World Cup may fail but later on for the way everything came together at the last minute and everything worked. From a technology point of view, WiFi was a big saviour in the stadiums, allowing good connectivity for everyone wishing to add the things they liked on social networks as soon as they can.

An example was this chart tweeted by Ruckus Wireless to proudly show what their achievement was with stadium WiFi.

Recently, Maravedis-rethink conducted a webinar with the Brazilian operator Oi, regarding their HetNet strategies. The video for the relevant part is embedded in the end. Two slides caught my attention. The first was about the different technologies and their concerns (above). For example for a HetNet to be successful, all components should synchronised and have a strict time accuracy requirements. The Backhaul & Fronthaul requirements are equally interesting for different cases.

The second interesting slide is the final one where they have their wish list to what they would like to do in near-term and long-term. WiFi features in all the scenarios except for the rural case (as expected). Anyway, here is the video:



You can download the slides from Slideshare here.

Is Wi-Fi the third RAN?

Most Metrocells trials that happened in the UK in 2012 and a few planned this year used Wi-Fi as the access technology. In the 3G4G blog I posted real life pictures from the Telefonica deployment. These small cells were using Wi-Fi as the access technology. The service providers are using WiFi for 'lamp/land grab' with the expectation that some of the sites would be replaced by LTE/HSPA Metrocells.

While some of these sites may start using the cellular technology, some of them will remain WiFi only. Also, the ones that use Cellular technology may still provide WiFi as an access technology, using Multimode Metrocells. We have to agree that Wi-Fi does solve the problem of Capacity crunch and when more users offload onto the WiFi, it can help improve coverage.

With Carrier Wi-Fi being touted as the next big thing, would it live up to the expectations and the hype?

Ruckus wireless have couple o interesting blog posts on this topic and I would advice anyone who is interested in this area to read them. They are available here and here. They also have an excellent whitepaper on Hotspot 2.0 that is available to view and download here.