How wireless technology will improve connectivity, efficiency and consumer experience in 2024

In 2024, wireless technology is expected to bring many improvements, enhancing connectivity, efficiency and consumer experience, which will change the way wireless technology is used in communities and enterprises around the world, including improving connectivity, efficiency and new consumer experiences.

In the future, 10GBPS speeds will be ubiquitous

Internet service providers (ISPs) are offering faster Internet speeds than ever before. To experience the real benefits of these advances, Wi-Fi must keep up. The massive increase in video traffic is also placing new burdens on the capabilities required of Wi-Fi networks, driving investment in new technologies. Fiber broadband deployments will continue to expand in most developed and developing markets, requiring upgrades to home Wi-Fi networks to deliver the increased bandwidth to devices.

As more and more countries open up the 6GHz band, the rapid adoption of Wi-Fi 6/6E will also be driven by its ability to access additional spectrum in the 6GHz band through the 6E extension. The 2023 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) will bring new developments in 6GHz allocations, and the WRC-23 agenda includes an item on potential 5G operations in the mid-band, although the development of spectrum pipelines has been a controversial issue in recent years.

Open Roaming growth will continue and expand integration

Open roaming growth will continue and expand into 2024, integrating with private 5G and IoT networks, reaching a tipping point of 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 connectivity access across disparate networks. By 2026, open roaming will reach a tipping point of exponential growth, with tens of millions of hotspots enabled. Beyond Wi-Fi, open roaming will expand to integration with private 5G and IoT in 2024. Open roaming has the potential to remove friction and securely connect billions of IoT devices.

More enterprises turn to network as a service

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

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

Against the backdrop of skilled labor shortages and shortened equipment replacement cycles, businesses are unable to keep up with the pace of innovation, which means there is financial pressure to move away from traditional capital models, thus driving the development of the NaaS model. The prevalence of security attacks is another reason why more businesses are turning to NaaS. In the NaaS model, NaaS providers provide continuous security updates to prevent and reduce damage and disruptions, thereby improving productivity and customer satisfaction.

Adaptive AI usage will explode

The use of adaptive AI will explode from permissive coordination to predictive network resources, from enabling automatic frequency coordination to predicting network resource requirements. The role of both AI and machine learning cannot be overstated.

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

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

Building a public core simplifies the network architecture and reduces operating costs through functional reuse. At the same time, by configuring the 5G core network element and the WLAN controller, interconnection between access systems with IP address preservation can be achieved in a simpler way across access switching, and can become the preferred solution for most deployments with existing Wi-Fi footprints.

Rather than competing with 5G on emerging high-performance use cases, Wi-Fi continues to focus on coexistence with 5G, particularly in identity management, authentication, and policy management. This suggests that large enterprises are already deploying private 5G because they want to work in tandem with Wi-Fi. Network executives are expected to continue deploying Wi-Fi and cellular networks over the next few 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.