In 2024, wireless technology is expected to bring improvements in many aspects, including improved connectivity, efficiency and new consumers, and will change the way wireless technology is used in communities and enterprises around the world. experience.

In the future, 10GBPS speeds will be everywhere

Internet service providers (ISPs) offer faster internet speeds than ever before. To experience the real benefits of these advances, Wi-Fi must keep up with these speeds. The massive increase in video traffic has also placed a new burden on the functionality required of Wi-Fi networks, driving investment in new technologies. Fiber broadband deployments will continue to expand in most developed and developing markets, requiring home Wi-Fi networks to be upgraded to deliver the increased bandwidth to devices.

As more and more countries open up the 6GHz band, the rapid popularity of Wi-Fi 6/6E will also be driven by its ability to access additional spectrum in the 6GHz band through 6E expansion. The 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) brings new developments in 6GHz allocations, with the WRC-23 agenda including a project on potential 5G operations in mid-band bands, although developing spectrum pipelines has been a contentious issue in recent years.

Open roaming growth will continue and integrations expanded

Open roaming growth will continue and expand into integration with dedicated 5G and IoT networks through 2024, reaching a tipping point for exponential growth by 2026, when tens of millions of hotspots will be enabled

Deployments will continue to increase as more brands and identity providers recognize the value of federation, enabling seamless connected access across disparate networks. By 2026, open roaming will reach a critical point of exponential growth, with tens of millions of hotspots enabled. In addition to Wi-Fi, open roaming will expand to integrate with dedicated 5G and IoT in 2024. Open roaming has the potential to remove friction and securely connect billions of IoT devices.

More businesses are turning to Network as a Service

NaaS (Network as a Service) will quickly spread beyond early adopters to traditional enterprises where the network delivers a cloud-first, software-defined, application-centric environment.

Network as a Service is defined as network infrastructure hardware, software, services, management and licensing components used in a subscription-based, or flexible consumption model. NaaS is on the rise, with early adopters including managed Wi-Fi in multi-apartment units, and will soon spread to traditional enterprises where the network delivers a cloud-first, software-defined, application-centric environment.

In the context of skilled labor shortages and shortened equipment replacement cycles, enterprises are unable to keep up with the pace of innovation, which means there is financial pressure to get rid of the traditional capital model, thus promoting the development of the NaaS model. The prevalence of security attacks is another reason why more enterprises are turning to NaaS. In the NaaS model, the NaaS provider provides continuous security updates to prevent and reduce breaches and outages, thereby increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.

The use of adaptive artificial intelligence will explode

The use of adaptive AI will explode from allowing coordination to predicting network resources, from enabling automatic frequency coordination to predicting network resource needs. Whether it is artificial intelligence or machine learning, its role cannot be overstated.

The role of artificial intelligence and machine learning cannot be overstated. The use of adaptive AI will range from implementing automatic frequency coordination mechanisms to predicting network resources. Wireless LAN vendors are developing versions of their AI secret sauce to stand out in an environment where hardware is completely standardized. Artificial intelligence will help enterprises and ISPs speed up troubleshooting, simplify monitoring and proactively predict outages, equipment failures and performance degradation. In an automated frequency coordination mechanism environment, AI will manage radio resources, manage power from devices and infrastructure, and perform cross-network coordination to maximize frequency reuse and thereby increase capacity.

Wi-Fi access private or public 5G services will develop rapidly

Building a common core simplifies network architecture and reduces operational costs through functional reuse. At the same time, by configuring 5G core network elements and WLAN controllers, cross-access switching can be implemented in a simpler way to achieve interconnection between access systems with IP address preservation, and can become a large network with existing Wi-Fi footprints. The preferred solution for most deployments.

Rather than competing with 5G on emerging high-performance use cases, Wi-Fi continues to work on coexisting with 5G, particularly around identity management, authentication and policy management. This suggests that large enterprises are already deploying private 5G because they want to work with Wi-Fi. Network executives are expected to continue deploying Wi-Fi and cellular networks in the coming years, with Wi-Fi 6/6E used in indoor, campus and fixed network environments and 5G cellular networks used in outdoor, off-campus and mobile environments. Wi-Fi 7 may not be enough to close the gap with 5G and convince some enterprises to choose it for more demanding use cases.