By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi Alliance’s 6 GHz Wi-Fi demonstration and pilot project in Thailand has shown the indisputable benefits of using the full 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi: Two hundred medical faculty students rated the full-band 6 GHz Wi-Fi experience nearly twice as good compared to narrower bandwidth alternatives. The two month pilot project was conducted at the Ramathibodi Chakri Naruebodindra Medical Institute (CNMI) Hospital in Bangkok.
There’s no longer any doubt that full-band 6 GHz Wi-Fi delivers an outstanding – and essential – user experience when it comes to connecting state-of-the-art AR/VR technology for medical training. Two hundred students at CNMI Hospital in Bangkok were virtually unanimous in their connectivity quality assessment when asked about reliability, speed, quality, and more, following a recent two-month trial.
The trial involved deploying a 6 GHz network (12 tri-band APs donated to the project by HPE Aruba) to serve AR/VR and high-density use cases at the medical institute. To examine the impact of 6 GHz bandwidth availability, the pilot was conducted in three phases: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz only, 2.4/5 GHz plus the lower 6 GHz band (500 MHz), 2.4/5 GHz plus the entire 6 GHz band (1200 MHz).
Enjoying this story?
Leave your email here and we'll get you all the latest Wi-Fi news.
The results were clear, says Gaurav Jain, VP of Technology, at Wi-Fi Alliance. “As expected, the results showed quality issues resulting from co-channel and adjacent channel interference when only three channels with 160 MHz bandwidth are available in the lower 500 MHz spectrum compared to the case with seven channels in the entire 1200 MHz spectrum in the 6 GHz band available,” he says.
The two months of trials involved teaching staff operating the hospital’s VR app and casting videos to laptops and display monitors within the clinical anatomy laboratory as well as group studies with multiple simultaneous users of the VR app. Other applications included streaming hospital course material to VR headsets as well as anatomical examinations administered to students using the hospital’s test app, Gaurav Jain explains. Meta provided the Meta Quest Pro headsets for the project.
In terms of throughput the full 6 GHz band allowed 1200 Mbps or more of capacity. Dual-band and lower 6 GHz tri-band phases of the trial delivered similar throughput rates at around 500-600 Mbps. Latency performance for full-band 6 GHz connectivity was also vastly superior, results show.
The pilot project was supported by the Wi-Fi Alliance, HPE Aruba Networks, United States Trade & Development Agency (USTDA), Thailand’s National Broadcasting & Telecommunications Commission, Intel, and Meta. The results of the pilot project sets the stage for Thailand’s pending regulatory decision on freeing up 6 GHz for Wi-Fi operations, says Wi-Fi Alliance.
“The overwhelmingly positive feedback from medical students underscores why access to the full 6 GHz band is essential. I’m hopeful that policymakers in Thailand and beyond will act expeditiously to unlock the full potential of the latest Wi-Fi technology, ensuring their citizens reap maximum benefits in education, healthcare, and other critical sectors,” says Alex Roytblat, VP of Regulatory Affairs at Wi-Fi Alliance.
/Claus.
