Qualcomm’s Rahul Patel: “Enterprise Wi-Fi is back with a vengeance”

By Claus Hetting, Wi-Fi NOW CEO & Chairman

Qualcomm’s Rahul Patel says enterprise Wi-Fi is ‘back with a vengeance’ as CIO’s prepare for the return of the workforce to the office. The office may not be exactly what it was before but one thing is for sure: More and better Wi-Fi will be needed – including Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, Patel says. Qualcomm is also bullish on high-performance mobile gaming as a driver for better Wi-Fi on the device side, and expects smaller form-factor residential Wi-Fi routers and mesh units to be the next massively popular items to hit consumer markets.

You would have been excused to think that enterprise Wi-Fi markets took a beating during the lockdowns – a prospect scary to many with vested interests in the segment, including yours truly. Fortunately the truth is that enterprise Wi-Fi has suffered less than most would have guessed (we wrote about it here) and now the enterprise segment is ‘back with a vengeance,’ says Rahul Patel, Qualcomm’s Senior VP and General Manager of Connectivity and Networking.

“While staff have been working from home, CIOs and IT managers have been preparing workspaces for better Wi-Fi. We believe future workspaces – starting today – will allow staff to move around more freely, and while they perhaps work less days at the office, they will expect to be much less tethered when they are there. Workers may want to join meetings by video conference even while physically present at the office, and really won’t want to connect to a cabled network at any time,” Rahul Patel says.

Qualcomm is of course a long-term supplier of Wi-Fi chipset technology to many leading enterprise Wi-Fi networking brands including CommScope (Ruckus), Cisco Meraki, Cambium Networks, Indian networking startup IO Networks by HFCL, and many others.

Meanwhile the next big thing to hit consumer markets will likely smaller form-factor Wi-Fi units – meaning compact APs or meshed extenders that might be not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Such mesh units will blend more easily into your home and serve a higher density of devices with higher-performance Wi-Fi, Rahul Patel says. These will typically be powered by Qualcomm’s ‘immersive home’ series Wi-Fi 6 and 6E platform, which was released in October of last year.

“It has been a huge year for the residential Wi-Fi market and especially for consumer mesh. When the lockdowns happened the ISPs were understandably caught off guard but have since largely caught up, and everyone now understands they need to transition to better Wi-Fi. There are very few low-grade broadband services left in the US – many of them now start at 500 Mbps. And to match that of course Wi-Fi 6 and beyond is needed,” says Rahul Patel.

On the device side Rahul Patel says Qualcomm’s FastConnect system – which supports Wi-Fi 6 and 6E – now dominates the market for premium-tier Android phones and that mobile gaming continues to drive a strong demand for high-performance Wi-Fi on devices especially across Asia. FastConnect also has an expanding footprint in providing connectivity for compute, a trend likely to spike as the latest multi-gigabit FastConnect systems enter the segment. Likewise Rahul Patel believes that a mass market breakthrough of AR/VR technology is still in the cards – powered by Wi-Fi, of course.

/Claus.