With the global launch of Samsung Galaxy Note III & LG’s G2 Smart devices, which come equipped with advance features such as 802.11ac, 802.11 Direct, Wi-Fi HotSpot and LTE (Rel 8), the trend is evident. More and more device makers are busy in building ecosystems to support launch of LTE & latest Wi-Fi standard 802.11ac.
As on Sep 2013, there were 213 commercial LTE networks launched in 81 countries and number is growing. In India, at present, except Bharti Airtel (Kolkata, B’lore & Pune with Delhi/Gurgaon shortly launching), no other telco has commercially launched LTE. But within years’ time, we are likely to see couple of other telcos joining the LTE rollout bandwagon.
As far as Wi-Fi (802.11) Network rollout are concerned, in past one year, all top 3 telcos have commercially launched their own versions of 802.11 and all of them are in 802.11n category. While Bharti Airtel has mixed deployments of Wi-Fi, Vodafone has soft launched network recently targeting enterprise segment. As far as Idea Cellular is concerned, company had initial success in rollout of residential Wi-Fi at four metros including Pune, H’bad, A’bad and Cochin and surely this year we would get to see addition of some more cities in the list.
Except Bharti, no other telco (who also launched Wi-Fi), has LTE Spectrum and none of them even possess pan India 3G Spectrum. The choice of going Wi-Fi way was obvious one, as Wi-Fi offers 600MHz of spectrum virtually at no cost to offload/carry rising data demands across urban India.
But can Wi-Fi carry trend forward for seamless integration with cellular networks?
As per Wi-Fi alliance, the governing body of Wi-Fi Ecosystem, the new HotSpot 2.o standard eases the norms of accessing visiting network while on roaming. With HotSpot 2.0 enabled devices emerging, any visitor with HotSpot 2.0 device can latch on to HotSpot 2.0 certified AP (Passpoint Certified hardware), which also has roaming agreement with user’s home network and then securely connect. Most of these procedures are automatic in the sense visitors don’t have to even provide login id and passwords to enable access. The beauty of the new HotSpot 2.0 standard was also evident when Boingo, the leading Wi-Fi service provider, launched next generation HotSpot at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport recently.
But story of Wi-Fi doesn’t stop here. With seamless roaming on cards for 802.11 devices making it almost equivalent to cellular roaming scenarios, the latest 802.11ac standard is going to take Wi-Fi speeds three times to existing 802.11n, while making devices six times more power efficient.
Often dubbed as ‘5G Wi-Fi’ or fifth generation Wi-Fi, 802.11ac which only operates in congestion free 5GHz band, has better speeds, low interference (as compared to 2.4GHz band), 8x capacity due to availability of more free non-overlapping channels and offers vast improvement in terms of reliability of Wi-Fi connection as compared to present 802.11n. Also all devices launched with 802.11ac are backward compatible to 802.11n.
But are we going to take Wi-Fi forward as standalone network offloading cellular data but not integrated to cellular fully? Certainly not!
IEEE, the body who developed 802.x standard, is presently working on a new Wi-Fi standard named as 802.11HEW- aka High Efficiency WLAN. The main driver for this new WLAN standard is the improvement of 802.11 PHY & MAC layer in both 2.4 GHz & 5 GHz bands and making it a friendly option to LTE, by improving offloading from licensed to unlicensed Wi-Fi Network.
According to various industry representatives, the new Wi-Fi standard isn’t about increasing Wi-Fi speeds but improving Wi-Fi experience on ground, especially in case of cellular to Wi-Fi offloading, dense Wi-Fi deployments such as stadium and various other scenarios. At present, although Wi-Fi Alliance isn’t actively involved into development & marketing of the new standard, soon we would get to see the support of alliance members. At present the initiative, backed by companies like Orange, who is engaged with IEEE body in developing specifications for 802.11HEW and other ground work formalities to take things forward.
For telecom operators, the road ahead is very challenging, who for past two decades happily managed 2G/GSM Network with little modifications to 2.5 & 2.75G. With advent of WCDMA/UMTS aka 3G in year 2010, the scenario started changing slowly. And now with advent of LTE and Next generation Wi-Fi Networks, in short span, telcos need to manage complete heterogeneous network environment comprising of GSM, UMTS, LTE & WLAN.
Moving away from GSM and UMTS, LTE and Wi-Fi offers completely different network architecture and packet based data transfer including carrying Voice as packets. More over with LTE network, the devices can handover calls/data session to WiMAX & WLAN Networks directly, which wasn’t possible with previous generation networks. Things will become more complex when VoLTE/VoWLAN scenarios will become more pervasive rather than old CS based call connectivity.
Wi-Fi offers the best alternative, not only in terms of cheap spectrum availability but also in terms of speeds, efficiency and capacity. And new Wi-Fi standards would be addressing needs of seamless roaming & easy integration with LTE and Cellular Networks. Going forward, LTE & Wi-Fi would rather co-exist and would be only two prominent networks to manage.
