Introduction

Why 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are becoming best of friends (and why everyone’s a winner)

Wi-Fi and cellular have traditionally been cast as adversaries in networking and data communications. The two technology ecosystems have come at the same general ‘networking’ market from different technology frameworks (IT v. telecoms) and have usually been deployed with opposing – and sometimes disruptive to each other – business models. But with the arrival of 5G standards and technologies in the cellular world and Wi-Fi 6 on the Wi-Fi front, that is changing fast.

Long story short: by refining their next generation technology frameworks around enterprise customer requirements, both technology sets have adopted similar radio processing, service and spectrum management capabilities. As a result, the sound of technology advocates sniping at each other across a narrowing technical divide has become outdated. Instead, the new consensus and narrative – already understood by tech-savvy users – is that both technologies are well engineered and cutting edge and the old cat-calls of technical inferiority levelled at Wi-Fi can no longer be sustained.

Meanwhile the I.T./Wi-Fi industry’s counter-narrative – that telco technology is woefully unsuited to handling high speed data – has also been skewered with the arrival of LTE Advanced, the latest iteration of 4G. Now, with 5G cellular and Wi-Fi 6 emerging, we’re seeing two even better, faster, and equally fit-for-purpose, radio data access technologies being given the commercial and standards support they need to work profitably together.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), like many of the telcos it works with, has a foot in both the Wi-Fi and next-gen cellular technology camps. It has a long history as a telco technology provider, most recently with network functions virtualisation (NFV) and related endeavours, especially at the telco ‘edge’ (a subject we will return to with the next TelecomTV ‘Perspectives’). HPE bolstered its Wi-Fi capability by buying Wi-Fi specialist Aruba in 2015 for $3 billion.

Consequently HPE can be seen as an enthusiast for what we might call the technology partnership approach to Wi-Fi 6 and 5G. But first some history and context on the two technologies.

Why 5G is a major trajectory change for cellular and a major opportunity for Wi-Fi

Fifth generation cellular (5G) has been designed, developed and now marketed with two imperatives. First, to unleash new spectrum and with it better speed and performance, making smartphone and other mobile devices perform better and able to tackle new, advanced applications in addition to coping with rising average smartphone data consumption – projected to be 21GB per month, up from ‘just’ 5.6Gb in 2018.

Second, 5G was also designed to intercept new use cases in the corporate market (or the ‘verticals’ as the industry jargon has it) and was formulated to act as an umbrella network able to extend its management capabilities out to the ‘feeder’ networks supplying it with data.

In fact the 3GPP standards body made it part of its 5G mission to canvas input from user ‘verticals’ when formulating the standards, with the idea that network operators could even engineer ‘network slices’ tuned to perform to meet their specialised use cases.

Network slicing is where the network is subdivided into conceptual vertical slices, each slice’s performance defined by its own protocol stack and granted the network functions and security appropriate to the application or use case.

Such an arrangement enables a 5G network operator to not only provide a network service tailored for a specific industry or organisation, but for the first time enables it to underpin mobile performance with a service assurance backed up with service level agreement, something that has been standard practice with fixed networks and network services, but has so far been lacking in mobile.

For most network operators deploying 5G today, that full ‘5G’ capability may be some years off as it will require massive network upgrades to install the ‘cloud native’ infrastructure capable of coping with these advanced network applications.

The problem for 5G is that – like 3G and 4G – it is essentially an ‘outside’ technology, while both consumer and enterprise applications will increasingly demand ‘indoor’ consumption.

Help is available, however, as the 5G network’s technical openness and operators’ ambitions to have it perform as an umbrella network for all other network types, sets the scene for Wi-Fi 6 to play a major role in connecting the outside 5G to the world inside.

Wi-Fi 6: the old kid on the block

Wi-Fi technology is generally thought to have a long-term, almost tribal, rivalry with cellular technology. Each cellular generational change has been marked by news articles asking if Wi-Fi has any future now that ‘x’G has arrived. That happened with the introduction of 3G and was a huge talking point with the arrival of LTE, but in both those cases the newer, faster cell technology only seemed to increase the use of Wi-Fi, not wipe it out.

With the arrival of 5G the question of Wi-Fi survival still gets asked in article headlines but more often than not is quashed in article conclusions.

The reason?

The latest iteration of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, is as great a step forward technically as 5G is to LTE. So not only is Wi-Fi 6 no longer held to be in danger by the advance of cellular but is now widely accepted as a peer network technology, reaching the parts and undertaking the use cases that cell technology (in this case 5G) alone can’t adequately tackle.

Differences in approach – don’t be tempted to crowd Wi-Fi 6 out

While it may often make sense for large telcos to develop openness around 5G and its relationship to Wi-Fi, it may make less sense to other, often smaller, telcos who would rather concentrate on a single technology set. These telcos might prefer to wade into intense radio network competition under a 5G-only banner and push 5G’s differentiation and its much publicised abilities for reliability, security and deterministic data delivery without complicating the pitch with support for Wi-Fi 6.

After all, a technology standard important enough to spark a widely-publicised ‘global race to 5G’ is not a bad marketing platform upon which to base a ‘pure’ 5G approach.

But according to Stuart, those companies which try to push 5G infrastructure into premises to displace Wi-Fi may regret doing so in the longer run when it becomes apparent that they and their customers probably spent extra money and took extra technology risks without winning any advantage in doing so.

The technology required by 5G to extend coverage indoors is substantially more expensive than Wi-Fi from both per-square-foot and lifecycle perspectives, so to use 5G for primary in-building access, a customer would need to upgrade their network as well as virtually all of their devices.

In summary, since the economics of Wi-Fi 6 are more favorable and performance is on par with 5G, Aruba envisions service providers using Wi-Fi as the radio front end for their 5G systems where it makes sense, as an alternative to Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and small cells.

This combined Wi-Fi 6/5G approach is often made easier by the fact that Wi-Fi ‘camps’ exist already inside many telcos and its members have considerable technology and applications experience behind them.