What a great way to start 2016: There’s been so much good news flooding the Wi-Fi industry last week that it’s hard to keep up. Here are my top 4 reasons why 2016 will be the year of Wi-Fi:
The LinkNYC project is finally underway – and don’t underestimate what this could mean for City Wi-Fi not just in NYC but everywhere. This project is backed by all the right companies, including Google (indirectly), Qualcomm, and a few tech leaders that I can’t mention, but important ones. If this works out commercially, it will be a great blueprint for lots of other cities. It’s even Passpoint (Wi-Fi roaming) enabled and secure.
WiGig (802.11ad) had it’s debut with this absurdly fast TP-Link home router. It’s still very early days for WiGig but it’s out there, it’s unlicensed and – as always in the Wi-Fi world – pretty darn low cost. That has been the recipe for success for the 802.11 standards for 25 years. I have not doubt that all kinds of home & office device companies will be all over this in due course – meaning this year. A 60 GHz router will be a different kind of beast that what you’re used to. Here’s a good overview of the tech.
Wi-Fi Alliance launched HaLow – a bid for IoT world dominance with 802.11ah low-power Wi-Fi based standard. With a range (some say) of one kilometre, HaLow may just be good enough take care of most IoT use cases. And if HaLow manages to piggy-back on a huge installed base of low-cost Wi-Fi devices, this could become a catalyst for IoT innovation. This is only going to work in the Americas since it uses 900 MHz ISM unlicensed bands. Here’s more on HaLow well covered by Wired.
Here’s a small news item (unfortunately in Danish) but something we will see a lot more of in 2016: Better Wi-Fi home coverage! We pretty much all suffer from bad home coverage. Now at least one fibre broadband company is doing something about it. It happens to be my local fibre company Waoo! right here in Denmark. They’re working with Turkey-based innovators Airties to launch a solution using an intelligent Wi-Fi CPE plus extension Wi-Fi units to place around the house. I have no doubt that millions of consumers are ready to pay real money for a fix to this annoying problem.
For all of this and more don’t miss Wi-Fi NOW USA the conference in Washington DC this April 19-21. We will be covering in-home, security, enterprise, leadership & innovation, and carrier Wi-Fi a the industry’s most comprehensive 3-day program. Check it out and register here!
/Claus
