How Wi-Fi 6, WWAN and 5G make fully wireless office possible

Why go all wireless? Requirements and savings

Employees expect and increasingly demand ubiquitous, high-performance wireless LANs (WLANs). New work models—conceived around the idea of ​​dynamic, spontaneous collaboration and working from anywhere—require reliable wireless networks.

Assuming the latest Wi-Fi is being built out everywhere in most organizations, IT can shift its perspective to Wi-Fi as the primary connectivity mode and wired as a secondary connectivity mode, available only when needed. This leads logically to the question of savings, "How much less can IT spend on the wired network if it exists primarily to power the WLAN?" The answer is a lot.

Most switch ports connect to user endpoints. In a wireless world, most switch ports disappear. In this case, fewer switch ports means fewer switches to purchase, power up, cool, maintain, manage, and secure. In addition, organizations can gain significant per-drop savings on cabling and rewiring endpoint connections in new office build-outs as well as renovations and reconfigurations.

How to achieve full wireless

With current WLAN technology and devices—and the advent of Wi-Fi 6—Wi-Fi capabilities already exceed the basic needs of most knowledge workers and shared office devices such as multifunction devices, smart whiteboards, and conferencing equipment.

Wi-Fi 6 is designed to address certain office challenges and needs, including wider coverage, higher device density, more simultaneous use, and a wide range of demand patterns. For example, some key Wi-Fi 6 features include:

• Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) enables an access point (AP) to serve multiple devices simultaneously by sending physically separated, or beamformed, signals to multiple devices.
• Multi-User Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (MU-OFDMA) enables the AP to divide each primary frequency channel into 256 subcarriers and bundle them into resource units of different sizes based on the needs of each client.
• The unused 2.4 GHz channels of the previous standard 802.11ac are reincorporated to meet the needs of low-power, long-range, or interference use cases common in IoT systems.
• Wi-Fi 6 takes a different approach to identifying potential conflicts on data channels than earlier standards. This should increase overall efficiency from 70% of theoretical maximum capacity at best to 90% or more.

Despite these promising features, the big issue is the clients and infrastructure organizations need to support Wi-Fi 6.

With previous generations of Wi-Fi, the general design guideline was about 30 clients per AP—roughly one AP every 800 to 1,600 sq. ft. Wi-Fi 6 networks are designed for 50 or 60 laptop/mobile clients per access point, plus a large number of low-load IoT devices, and one access point every 2,000 to 3,000 sq. ft.

Of course, these are just rough guidelines. This varies greatly from product to product. Finally, the physical characteristics of the space lead to Wi-Fi design issues. Wi-Fi engineers need to consider the size and shape of the office, the building materials used, the furniture and the surrounding environment, as well as the needs and usage patterns of the population served.

Improved WLAN security

Wi-Fi 6 drives some important security enhancements in WLANs by requiring Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 instead of WPA2 or earlier. WPA3 features higher encryption levels, enhanced client authentication, and resistance to brute force attacks.

In the long term, it is critical to make WLAN part of a comprehensive zero-trust architecture. The use of WLAN should be just another aspect of zero-trust network access and should ideally be supported by the same platforms as wired systems and offsite users—for example, those using software-defined perimeter (SDP) systems. SDP services provide session-level data encryption that is independent of network media and location, complementing the improved encryption protections in Wi-Fi 6.

The rise of WWAN and the decline of WLAN

Several factors have combined to drive the use of wireless wide area network (WWAN) connections in recent years, including the following trends:

• Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) emerged to help manage the integration of multiple connection media within a single location organization and provide policy-based control.
• 4G is everywhere, and 5G is rapidly becoming popular.
• Many organizations are turning to cloud applications.
• More people are working from home, and many organizations have replaced larger, more centralized offices with smaller, more decentralized ones.
• Wireless pricing plans have become like wireline pricing plans, with a flat rate for a given capacity and no rate caps or overage costs based on the amount of data transferred.

With or without SD-WAN, organizations of all sizes are increasingly incorporating WWAN into their branch connectivity strategies, whether as backup, overflow, or primary connectivity.

The next logical step is to explore a WLAN-free environment where end-user devices connect to 4G or 5G via private or public operator services.

Keep in mind that 5G offers some distinct advantages over 4G, in much the same way that Wi-Fi 6 offers advantages over older Wi-Fi standards. 5G offers higher speeds, better security, better performance management, and the ability to support a higher density of devices. In fact, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 use many of the same technologies and strategies.

Private 5G, due to an organization’s increased control over the infrastructure, could offer better security than public carrier services, whether the organization manages it or contracts for it as a service.

The Challenge of Full Wireless

Despite the inclusion of power-saving techniques that optimize radio usage, Wi-Fi 6 APs require more power than previous generations of APs due to the increased number of radios and processing power. The older 802.3af standard for Power over Ethernet needs to be upgraded to 802.3at, which can be expensive if it means replacing a PoE switch or its power supply.

As the density of services per AP increases, the uplinks to the campus aggregation or spine switches need to bear higher loads. Organizations may find that a single Gigabit Ethernet link may not be sufficient and may need to plan for higher capacity links or - if the AP supports it - a bonded set of GbE connections.

Furthermore, specific locations will continue to have problems, such as poor reception in certain areas due to spatial geometry or building materials. Remedies, such as deploying additional APs or different kinds of antennas, are well known.

Interference from devices ranging from wireless subwoofers to microwave ovens remains a problem. And, even with Wi-Fi 6, wireless networks are more likely to be overwhelmed than wired ones — for example, by widespread simultaneous software downloads like Patch Tuesday.

To minimize such issues, proper WLAN design requires site mapping with the right tools to test radio reception, and then mapping APs to properly cover the space, number of users, and devices. Likewise, troubleshooting requires Wi-Fi-specific equipment and software.

Wireless first, wired only when needed

There are only a few cases where wireless doesn’t cover all enterprise office needs. Some problematic scenarios might include business operations that generate a lot of RF interference or building structures that are not Wi-Fi friendly, such as walls full of pipes or plastered walls over chicken wire.

In reality, most organizations only need to worry about use cases that require high-speed transfer of large amounts of data; for example, if sustained transfer speeds exceed 1 Gbps. This might involve moving high-resolution imaging data from an MRI machine to a workstation for analysis, or transferring large video files in a special effects lab.

However, such situations tend to be edge cases, even for media-intensive companies. These are the exception, not the rule. In these extreme cases, any branch office strategy that focuses primarily on wireless should dictate that the branch office have one or more wired workstations to support the required work.

Alternatively, a branch office could have places where regular wireless workstations can connect to the network cable as needed—basically, connectivity dictates the hotel. A wired infrastructure supporting APs can probably accommodate these edge cases, and since they are few and far between, there is usually no added cost.

Looking ahead, given the capabilities of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G, most organizations can — and should — adopt wireless standards by default, pulling out wired connections only when needed.