How to accelerate enterprise innovation and transformation with the help of Wi-Fi 6?

Wi-Fi 6's expansion to 6GHz is further attributed to growing demand, with Wi-Fi 6E generating unprecedented interest among regulators around the world and gaining widespread adoption in products, service providers, and enterprise deployments. It is expected that more than 2.3 billion Wi-Fi 6 products and 350 million Wi-Fi 6E products will enter the market in 2022, and more than 15% of Wi-Fi 6 shipments this year will also be Wi-Fi 6E.

In 2022, Wi-Fi Certified 6 adds enhancements to best enable advanced use cases. Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E are optimally configured to meet today’s connectivity needs and support a steady stream of new product and service innovations.

Two years ago, the United States opened up the 6GHz band for Wi-Fi. Since then, more than 60 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC have made the band available or are considering making it available for Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi 6E ecosystem is expanding rapidly, and its certification helps ensure global interoperability of devices, no matter where they are deployed.

For example, some countries, including Brazil, Canada, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, have already made both the upper and lower 6GHz bands (5925-7125MHz) available for Wi-Fi 6E. By making the full band available, some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, are seeking to harness the full potential of Wi-Fi 6E, noting that Wi-Fi is vital to their populations. Other countries have opened up the lower portions of the band (5925-6425MHz), which are ultimately popular, but Wi-Fi 6E and future generations will realize their full potential by using the entire 1200MHz spectrum in the 6GHz band.

The global Wi-Fi 6 market is expected to grow. According to data from a market research agency, Wi-Fi 6 will grow from US$11.5 billion in 2022 to US$26.2 billion in 2027, with a global market compound annual growth rate of 17.9%. Its major suppliers include Cisco, Intel, Broadcom, NXP, Huawei, Qualcomm, Murata, MediaTek, etc.

These players have adopted various growth strategies such as developing partnerships, business expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and new product launches to expand their share of the Wi-Fi 6 market. From 2019 to 2022, developing partnerships and new product launches are the most adopted strategies by major players, which help them innovate products and expand their customer base.

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology based on the IEEE 802.11 standard series is one of the most successful wireless communication technologies in the past two decades. It is essentially based on the OFDM access scheme and usually operates in unlicensed frequency bands such as 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 60GHz, which carries an important part of the traffic from various devices in current and future wireless communication networks.

The sixth generation of Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6), based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, represents an improvement in its communication efficiency and will also operate on the newly launched 6GHz spectrum (Wi-Fi 6E). In addition, standardization of the seventh generation (Wi-Fi 7) has begun, with the goal of achieving extremely high throughput (IEEE 802.11be).

Wi-Fi 7 was developed with a focus on extreme Wi-Fi throughput, which refers to its expected support for up to 30Gbps throughput, about three times that of Wi-Fi 6. In short, Wi-Fi 7 will provide venue-wide coverage with enhanced range and higher performance, even in the most demanding environments.

The industry believes that although there are high expectations for the 6GHz spectrum, in the next step, many users may directly bypass Wi-Fi 6E and enter Wi-Fi 7 enterprise-level products. One of the reasons is that mass production of Wi-Fi 6E will be a challenge. With MediaTek releasing the first Wi-Fi 7 chip in the first half of this year, enterprise-level products are just around the corner.