WBA Annual Industry report highlights how Wi-Fi is positioned to support 5G-type performance and use cases

The level of industry confidence in Wi-Fi investment is at its highest-ever, according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance’s Annual Industry Report for 2017.

As the wireless industry becomes crucial to delivering high quality, high speed, low latency connectivity, the new global study has revealed that over 80 per cent of those surveyed feel as or more confident than they did a year ago. And when looking at unlicensed spectrum more broadly, almost half (47 percent) feel more confident.

The report, compiled by Maravedis on behalf of the WBA, comes at a significant time for the wireless ecosystem. There is a growing consensus that the success of 5G, unlike previous generations of standards, will rely on the convergence of multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs) in unlicensed, shared and licensed spectrum, with Wi-Fi playing the central role.

Developments in the latest Wi-Fi standards, including 802.11ax, will improve Wi-Fi performance and capabilities to support 5G use cases – including high density networks, extreme Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and aggregation of multiple frequencies, amongst others.

“Wireless use cases are expanding rapidly, enabled by new technologies and spectrum in the unlicensed and shared bands”, said Adlane Fellah, senior analyst, Maravedis. “These innovations are laying the foundations for the 5G era, in which Wi-Fi will play a central role.”

As industry attention moves toward monetising Wi-Fi, the study also highlights the drivers of additional traffic over the network, as well as use cases with initial revenue potential in different verticals. In this year’s survey, the services most important to monetisation strategies for 2018 according to respondents included location based services (37.5 percent), roaming (33 percent) and marketing analytics (almost 33 percent).

The three Wi-Fi use cases tipped to drive near term revenue potential include: extending internet access and media to a full smart home, richer and more efficient enterprise services driven by cloud managed networks and security, and expansion of the Wi-Fi roaming model.