Wireless networking innovation will continue in 2022, despite the on-going upheavals that began at the start of this decade. The aim remains to create greater flexibility in how IT teams deploy, configure, and manage an increasing array of wireless networking technologies and opportunities for the benefit of the enterprise. With this in mind, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, expects to see the following predictions play out through the rest of the year:
#1: ENTERPRISE WI-FI 6E INSTALLS WILL SURPASS 10 MILLION IN 2022
While 2021 was marked as the year of regulatory approvals, 2022 will be remembered as the year of wide-scale W-FI 6E adoption in the enterprise. Put simply, Wi-Fi 6E represents the single largest allocation of unlicensed spectrum in history. That allocation represents a massive increase in capacity, along with wider channel bandwidths. Organizations will and are aggressively seeking access point installs to take advantage of this new, clean spectrum, with the aim to segregate traffic according to quality-of-service requirements: regulating 2.4 GHz for IoT, 5 GHz for legacy devices and guest traffic, while saving 6 GHz for bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications including 8K video or healthcare imaging.
By the end of the year, expect to see 10 million or more Wi-Fi 6E access points (APs) in the field worldwide.
#2: THE RISE OF LOCATION-AWARE WI-FI INFRASTRUCTURE
A persistent challenge for Wi-Fi has been establishing accurate indoor location data. However, advances in Wi-Fi Fine Time Measurement (FTM) paired with scalable approaches to determining access-point reference locations, promise to enable new client services, enrich network analytics tools, and enhance quality of service.
Recently, Bluetooth beacons have served as an effective stopgap method, if costly and labor-intensive, enabling effective indoor location applications. However, FTM, built into the Wi-Fi infrastructure, will emerge this year as a highly scalable alternative, quickly becoming the dominant basis for accurate and ubiquitous indoor location information. Common overlay deployments of beacons, whether physical or “virtual,” will die out, saving network administrators time, money, and headaches. Conversely, every Wi-Fi network will deliver accurate location information as easily as it has delivered access to data.
#3: THE CONTEXTUALLY-WIRELESS NETWORK WILL GAIN MOMENTUM
Solving strategic business problems - whether through enhancing productivity, improving efficiency, ensuring safety, promoting loyalty, or providing comfort - requires more than connecting network traffic.
These solutions require contextual knowledge, environmental awareness, and the ability to make projections of future scenarios. The network infrastructure will become a sponge for contextually significant data, including location, identity, applications in use, and security posture.
As networks connect, protect, and analyze the interactions among devices, people, and its environments, the results of the analysis will be shared across business applications, enabling use cases far removed from wireless connectivity, but again based entirely on familiar and widely deployed wireless networks.
To that end, 2022 will see the ascendance of hyper-aware Wi-Fi access points as hubs for an array of sensors and radios supporting the Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT). These hubs will access powerful analytics engines, both locally and in the cloud, that fuse device data and context to create value and solve real problems for businesses and customers.
#4: WHILE LOWERING COSTS, BUILT-IN AI EFFICIENCY WILL DOUBLE
As cloud-managed networking adoption grows, the ease with which infrastructure and client telemetry can be collected and used to gain insights will fundamentally change how organizations view data and the network architecture. With more built-in AI across entire organizations, businesses will increase the efficiency with which insights are converted into actions, potentially by 50% or more.
In conjunction, a new generation of AIOps capabilities will extend the value of networking AI from primarily troubleshooting scenarios to providing visibility into client behavior on a global scale. This includes the ability to further optimize networks across wireless, wired or SD-WAN, in addition to enhancing the overall user experience.
#5: PRIVATE 5G WILL GAIN A FOOTHOLD IN THE ENTERPRISE
This is the year 5G extends beyond mobile network operators and becomes a viable technology for private enterprise networks. In the US, the CBRS spectrum available for private use will see its first 5G radios, offered in form factors that allow them to be deployed similar to Wi-Fi access points along with core networks scaled to the needs of the enterprise. Similarly, in countries throughout the world, spectrum is being allocated specifically for private enterprise use. Private 5G will be deployed in conjunction with Wi-Fi to support use cases that require dedicated, clean spectrum or continuous, wide-area outdoor coverage.
No longer will enterprises have to wait for mobile network operators to deliver long-promised private 5G services.
Building to New Opportunities in 2022
Since the dawn of this decade, networking professionals and business leaders have learned to navigate an unpredictable and increasingly dynamic world. This year, networking leaders will shift attention from simply staying operational to building new opportunities-based and compelling technologies, including Wi-Fi 6E and private 5G. In particular, executives can extract increasing value from wireless investments and infrastructure by leveraging new location and contextual awareness capabilities within their respective networks. In short, organizations can begin envisioning a future in which they can develop entirely new services and insights in support of emerging business objectives.
