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Wireless Trends in 2015
Wireless, particularly Wi-Fi has become a near-ubiquitous technology which enables enterprises to leverage and create a more productive and collaborative environment. At the same time, service providers and consumers are reinforcing each other’s behaviour to leverage Wi-Fi platform. This article analyses the trends in Wireless in the current year.
From the enterprise perspective, starting from Wired desktops, there has been a significant shift towards wireless devices – it started with laptops, then desktops, and then a massive explosion of smart phones – which have replaced the former two to a large extent. With reduced form factors adding to mobility, consumers have now using mobile devices almost ubiquitously. Add this to mobile applications that enable many day-to-day activities, and enterprise applications (workflows, approvals, emails, chat) on the phone itself. In short, wi-fi hotspots have enable hi-speed transactions that would have been a bottleneck few years ago. In short, wi-fi has become a key contributor to employee collaboration and productivity.
According to a research forecast by MarketsandMarkets the global Wi-Fi market is set to grow from $12.89 billion in 2014 to $26.19 billion by 2019. In terms of regions, North America is expected to be the biggest market in terms of market size, while Asia pacific and Latin America are expected to experience increased market traction during the forecast period. The top 5 players are Cisco, HP, Aruba, Motorola and Ruckus. Aruba has since been acquired by HP, to make it the second largest wireless vendor. “Across all geographies and in most of the key verticals, the expansion of mobility applications for enterprise IT continues to drive new investments in WLAN infrastructure,” says Raja Vairamuthu, Regional Sales Director, Aruba, quoting a Gartner report. “While the growth rate has stabilized in the recent times, new mobility applications, particularly for the education, retail, and healthcare industry, along with expanded deployment options and the continued emergence of 802.11ac will lead to continued growth in the enterprise WLAN market.”
The year of 2015 is the year of the ‘consolidated hotspots’. This year will see the formation of large scale hotspot roaming groups. This will be around large scale service providers, and will also become the next Wi-Fi standard for service providers that introduces multi-user multiple input and output, allowing a Wi-Fi access point to talk to more than one user at a time. Home spots will also become a standard offering from wireline providers. The LTE small cell market will also continue to slowly develop as the industry grapples with who pays for indoor deployments.
Bring your own device ( BYOD) adoption from organizations will push them to create more high-speed and dependable Wi-Fi hotspots. With 11ac becoming prevalent, it is imperative that new access points are deployed with this technology. Raja explains – one of the unique features of Aruba’s Wireless Access Solution is called ‘client match’. The existing technology in vogue with other wireless technology players limits roaming clients (end points) through ‘stickiness’. So wherever one goes, the user can still connect with the registered access point irrespective of distance. Unless a disconnection happens, the device cannot scan, switch and register with another access point which is nearest. But in Aruba, it is all about seamless roaming. The WAP software ensures that the user is attached to the nearest access point even when they are roaming. This change happens seamlessly and helps end users have a transparent network access, helping in large overlapping wireless hot spots, Raja says. This is possible with 11ac and the new 11ad technologies.
Education institutions will deploy Wi-Fi even more prominently. With large campuses coming into being, and higher education gaining prominence, students stay in various portions of the campus like hostels, libraries, open grounds – but still access both local resources, for example, stored in digital libraries. ‘In many cases, students use three devices – a laptop, a tablet and mobile devices. Integrating these three devices with a single identity – using a RADIUS or an LDAP server is key for protection,” says Raja.
Another interesting development is the nature of applications that will ride the ‘now stable’ and ‘ever available’ Wi-fi infrastructure. Applications of enterprise scale, which can be accessed from devices like smart phones, tablets and laptops will be used. These applications are mission critical in nature and also data intensive. Wi-fi will also enable large file transactions and heavy downloads for both enterprise and home use. There are as many of 5.8 million Wi-Fi hotspots in the world as of 2015, a report indicates.
Another trend of this is the explosion in the number of devices that access these enterprise applications. While 3G and 4G enable continued access, the limitation is due to the bandwidth and cost associated with data transfers. Wi-Fi enables therefore, to a large number of devices to access these applications that are heavy duty, and enables them to perform to their ‘smart’ capabilities.
Wireless operators like Airtel have realized the benefit of Wi-Fi, and in fact, there is a need to build more Wi-Fi hotspots for the above reasons. Wi-Fi does not compete with data plans, and in fact carrier operators offer a combo pack in many places. The result, as Hariharan Mahadevan, Vice President – Tamil Nadu Circle Customer Relationships, Airtel says, interestingly, the WiFi plans they have devised keeping end-users in mind is being well-received by many small business owners, who own sole proprietorship firms. This model offers a win-win situation for all; the ordinary users can access the web round the clock, the small businesses can lower their operational expenses and providers can save nearly 300 Rs for every gigabyte they offer.
Another evolution is Wi-Fi through data cards. With 4G plans bringing out high speeds, Wi-Fi dongles become plug and play Wi-Fi access points. Supporting up to 10 users, it helps to setup an on-the-fly network. With mobile tethering being used by users to create hotspots for up to one or two users, there is still the need for ‘mobile’ hotspots which rely on 3G or 4G access. This will increase as groups of people travel on business purposes. This data card Wi-Fi business is now proliferating as per Hariharan, even though he cannot disclose revenues.
Now data based calling has also moved forward. After initial resistance from the regulators and the top service providers, it is clear that ‘Wi-Fi’ calling’s time has come. Whatsapp, Skype, Viber and the likes have enabled calling through data links, which means that voice calls are now transmitted as data packets across networks. This will increase for the time to come, and Wi-Fi hotspots will become ‘personal calling booths’, like the STD booths of the olden days.
Guest Wi-fi connections in shopping malls, airports and parks will enable near-ubiquitous Internet access. This will lead to one significant aspect of what is called smart cities these days. This is in fact, already part of the Digital India plan that Government of India is structuring.
Wi-Fi has become the stepping stone for way forward for both enterprises and consumers. This will span multiple applications and various ideas, which will benefit both channels and service providers who can seize the opportunities as they arise in the next few years.
