This article is co-authored by Fanny Mlinarsky, Senior Vice President of Wi-Fi Products at Spirent Communications and Steve Douglas, Head of Market Strategy at Spirent Communications.
What’s the difference between Wi-Fi and 5G? Those of us in the industry can likely rattle off a long list of distinctions, weigh strengths and weaknesses, and discuss different use cases. But sometimes, this technical familiarity can blind us to a more basic reality: to enterprise customers, wireless is just wireless. Whichever technology can reliably connect their applications, with the performance and capabilities they need, that’s what they’ll use.
Until recently, this question was largely academic. Wi-Fi dominated enterprise networking, with cellular reserved mostly for smartphones and a few specialized use cases. Now though, that status quo is starting to shift. A new generation of private 5G network offerings could, for the first time, give enterprises a real choice.
If we’re looking down the road, we might ask which technology customers will ultimately prefer. However, customers themselves are starting to ask more interesting questions: Why should they have to choose in the first place? Does it really make sense for 5G and Wi-Fi to exist in completely separate worlds? Or is it time to start converging them under a single wireless umbrella?
The answer is… maybe. Yes, businesses can realize significant benefits from some level of integration between Wi-Fi and cellular. But just how much convergence is really necessary? And given the technical and institutional barriers involved, how much is even possible? These are open questions. Over the next few years, we’ll start to get some answers.
What does convergence look like?
“Convergence” can be a fuzzy term, especially when talking about technologies that already exist together, at one level or another, in many wireless environments. (Reading this on a 5G smartphone connected to Wi-Fi? Voila, you’ve got convergence!) Consider two basic options:
- Full convergence implies a deep integration between Wi-Fi and cellular, where the silicon at the heart of wireless devices, even the standards themselves support the use of both technologies within a unified framework. In this model, Wi-Fi and 5G devices could share authentication frameworks, and use a single policy and management stack to assure end-to-end quality across infrastructures.
- Coexistence suggests a world where Wi-Fi and 5G are still separate, but it’s easier to use them together. At the most basic level, this can just mean taking steps to minimize interference for devices using the same unlicensed spectrum. But coexistence can encompass more advanced handovers and traffic-steering too - managed at the device or management layer—even while operating as separate infrastructures.
Full convergence could enable more sophisticated, policy-driven traffic-steering for real-time applications. (Imagine, for example, offering guaranteed connectivity, under service-level agreements, for autonomous vehicles roaming indoor/outdoor campuses.) But we can do quite a lot with coexistence as well, even providing some level of intelligent traffic management and handoffs. In the near future at least, coexistence will offer the more practical opportunities.
Driving towards integration
We can’t know what level of convergence the industry will ultimately achieve. But we’ll definitely get to some level of convergence, or at least better coexistence than what exists today. There are just too many forces driving enterprises to demand it, and too many intriguing opportunities for wireless stakeholders. Opportunities like:
- Supporting advanced wireless use cases: When enterprises can more tightly integrate Wi-Fi and 5G, they can use each technology to augment the other. They can fill coverage gaps across indoor/outdoor environments, authenticate SIM-enabled Wi-Fi devices in 5G cores, and allow devices to select the best network available based on performance or cost. Of particular interest to enterprises, devices could use both networks simultaneously to ensure nonstop connectivity for mission-critical applications.
- Simplifying operations: It’s easy to imagine a future where enterprises use a mix of Wi-Fi, 5G, Bluetooth, Sigfox, and other technologies, and find their environments getting enormously complex. When businesses rely on loosely coupled systems that have to interoperate, there is always higher risk of problems - and significant overhead building, testing, and validating deployments. The more network architects can consolidate, the easier their jobs become.
- Differentiating wireless offerings: Closer convergence could enable new opportunities for service providers as well. Many of today’s biggest enterprise Wi-Fi players, for instance, are cable operators who, in recent years, have begun offering 5G/LTE services as Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). The ability to tightly couple 5G and W-Fi could help them offer more attractive, differentiated enterprise wireless solutions.
Overcoming barriers
As exciting as the possibilities may be, the industry will need to overcome significant barriers to achieve them, especially for deep convergence. At the most basic level, 5G and Wi-Fi are very different standards, designed by different groups with different objectives. Hashing out details for basic spectrum management and handoffs gets quite complicated. Trying to create a unified policy and control framework across technologies, even more so. Industry bodies have begun exploring early integration possibilities in 3GPP and Wi-Fi standards, but we are still in very early stages.
Even if standards bodies agree on deeper convergence, the entire wireless ecosystem—device manufacturers, chipmakers, and many others—would need to come together to actually implement it. And there remain significant business and political hurdles to that level of cooperation. Wi-Fi and cellular vendors have little incentive to risk ceding control or customer share.
Ultimately, the question may come down to what chipmakers decide to do. It’s the huge silicon manufacturers, after all, who would have to build the hardware and low-level driver software to make deep convergence possible. Today, these multi-billion-dollar businesses serve both cellular and Wi-Fi markets. Would embracing convergence cannibalize their existing business? Will they move towards a hybrid approach, offering standalone systems alongside more integrated offerings? As the chipmakers go, so likely goes the industry. We’ll have to wait and see.
Looking ahead
These are all intriguing questions, but they may be obscuring a deeper reality. If vendors don’t move forward with convergence, a new player may soon take the decision out of their hands: the cloud. Hyperscalers don’t really care how customers access the cloud, they just want to get them there as seamlessly as possible. How hard is it to imagine Amazon or Google offering enterprises networks that use a mix of small cells and Wi-Fi access points, and converging everything for them in the cloud?
However, you feel about these possibilities, whichever side of the industry you’re on, we should all be careful not to overcomplicate things. Convergence might be technically complex, but what enterprises are asking for is simple: connectivity that’s reliable, performant, and secure. Whoever gives them that will do well—no matter what technology they’re using behind the scenes.
