By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Cisco’s pavilion at Mobile World Congress is usually one of the most interesting sources of insight into state-of-the-art enterprise Wi-Fi and applications – and this year was no different. We caught up with Cisco Wireless CTO Matt MacPherson, Engineering Product Manager Shai Silberman, and Distinguished Engineer Bart Brinckman. We’ve also picked a few additional highlights (see photos below).
Cisco Wi-Fi serves more than 22,000 guests at MWC
This week Cisco has – as always – been providing the live Wi-Fi (including OpenRoaming with Passpoint auto-connect) at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and this year device statistics from Cisco’s Network Operations Center reveal the 6 GHz adoption story: The number of clients ready to connect to 6 GHz Wi-Fi has more than doubled since last year while in Hall 3 of the MWC – where Cisco’s booth is located – more than 50% of devices are 6 GHz ready, Cisco says. At the Cisco booth more than 70% of devices are 6 GHz enabled. Also on display was a unified wireless IoT application using UWB, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi to enable efficient real-time patient monitoring – see the video below for details.
Adoption of 6 GHz devices explodes at MWC
Adoption of 6 GHz-capable Wi-Fi devices has improved tremendously at MWC this year compared to last year (see spectrum utilisation map below) but famously, Europe is still undecided on permitting upper 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi operation. As a result the upper 6 GHz band is empty and could easily have provided plenty of much needed additional Wi-Fi capacity at MWC in Barcelona this year.
Cisco Spaces at MWC: Foot traffic, traffic heat map, and more
One of the many impressive Cisco demonstrations at MWC is the Cisco Spaces application showing people density (foot traffic) across the many giant halls at MWC. Foot traffic analysis allows organisers to optimise people flows and set pricing for booths based on traffic. Cisco also uses AI-based radio resource management (channel allocations) to optimise overall Wi-Fi performance at MWC. One of Cisco’s main radio innovations of this year is the WiFi NOW Award-winning Catalyst 9179F hyper-directional Wi-Fi 7 AP, which adds much needed Wi-Fi capacity and performance at for example large venues such as the MWC and at stadiums, too.
Wayfinding at the MWC with ultra-wideband and more
Accurate wayfinding is now possible on Cisco infrastructure using new ultra-wideband technology combined with other methods including Wi-Fi. At MWC Cisco showed how Cisco Spaces accurately determines the walking path for example to and from meeting rooms at Mobile World Congress – a highly useful application given the size and complexity of the Fira in Barcelona.
Demonstrating ultra-reliable wireless backhaul (URWB)
URWB is not Wi-Fi – but it runs on Cisco’s Wi-Fi access points (and on Wi-Fi spectrum) and it delivers a big boost to backhaul reliability in order to serve – for example – latency-critical communications for industry. At MWC Cisco demonstrated URWB by way of a remotely operated toy jeep (see below). Cisco is pushing for a version of URW to be included into future Wi-Fi standards, Matt MacPherson said.
/Claus.
