What's Up, Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi/WLAN is a truly agile technology and business. WLAN access points are thrown to any non-regulated, non-organized radio environment and they are expected to survive on their own and faithfully serve users. WLAN as business is known for numerous acquisitions and constant flux.

WIRELESS OR WIRED?
Enterprises, hospitals, warehouses are moving to wireless if they are not yet there. “History does not guarantee future gains” but it is still interesting to look back. It was March 27th, 1991. The first GSM call in the world was made in Radiolinja GSM network in Finland. Author had a privilege to be building and optimizing Radiolinja network with network vendor (Siemens) side. At the same time, the early WLAN devices became available. However, that time WLAN did not make it to enterprises yet. Late 90’s WLAN started to enter homes and only after that enterprises. To sum up, general personal mobile communications has been present about 20 years and the first enterprises got wireless about 10 years ago.

Looking back what happened in last 10 years, it is quite difficult to imagine 10 years ahead and you still plug the LAN cable into your laptop. The same applies to traditional telephones (which I recently heard are still used somewhere…). Typically LAN cables run in a wiring enclosure attached to building outer walls and every two-three meter there are is a pair of LAN plugs. As each plug requires a dedicated LAN port in floor switching, there are a lot of LAN ports and switch boxes. Still, most of the LAN ports remain unused. Think about the savings you get if you don’t any more need all those LAN ports and there is no need to build all that cabling, but employees are really wireless. Not to even talk about the other benefits of being wireless, like productivity and ease of work. Last years, the Most Wired index has been used to rank the most advanced hospitals. Now the index is called The Most Wireless!

BIG NAMES ON THE MOVE
Business flux comes from a practice of large vendors to acquire advanced technology and integrate it to their product offering. Cisco Enterprise WLAN is based on acquisition of Airespace in 2005. In 2007, Cisco acquired Cognio spectrum analyzer technology. Motorola closed a deal with Symbol Technologies in 2007 as well to get Enterprise WLAN business up to speed. HP has not been standing still either and acquired Colubris Networks in 2008 and just recently in November 2009 as well 3COM & H3C. A bit surprisingly, Test & Measurement vendor Fluke acquired AirMagnet in August 2009. It seemed like Cisco was going to acquire AirMagnet. Similar events follow with Aruba, Siemens and other major market players.

It is interesting to follow what comes out after the acquisition and when. One recent one was Cisco introducing ClearAir technology in April 2010, which is basically Cognio spectrum analyzer integrated to a new access point type with some combined functionality. It took three years from Cisco to get the product out. HP has clearly decided to seriously challenge Cisco’s over 50% market share position in enterprise WLAN and further actions are expected to get there. Nokia-Siemens Networks (NSN) recently announced its plans to acquire certain wireless assets from Motorola. With all the generic jargon applied to press releases, it seems obvious that Enterprise WLAN business will not move to NSN and that will become a very remarkable focus area for Motorola.

SURVIVAL WITH THE DATA TORNADO
Long expected data tornado with mobile networks finally took off with combination of IPhone and unlimited data plans. Social media applications and YouTube bring their own flavor to complement this growth. This phenomenon throws quite a bit of load to mobile networks and mobile operators are struggling to expand the capacity enough to meet the demand. Cisco estimates (Feb 2010) that mobile data volumes grow about 40 times over the next five years. That’s what I call a tornado growth. As the mobile networks are already now out of capacity and wide area mobile network frequency bands are soon consumed, what’s next?

Network dimensioning is the art of science for making sure network have enough capacity. The biggest challenge in dimensioning wireless networks is that for optimum end user performance, dimensioning needs to be done considering the peak traffic volume (“busy hour”). And it is not enough to transfer the data from terminal to base station, but it needs to go somewhere from there also with even bigger data pipe since there any several radio cells and radio transceivers inside one base station site with own peak traffic capacity needs . With the 40x data volume growth numbers and a significant peak traffic margin on top of that, that’s a lot capacity. One might think that Ericsson and NSN are making tons of money, but unfortunately new Chinese vendors have spoiled the party with fierce competition.

There are obviously different options for adding capacity and one of them proposed by operators is 3G-WLAN data offloading. Interestingly, last years operators have seen WLAN as a threat for their business, now suddenly it may save them from very large investments to additional mobile network capacity. In terminal side, WLAN and mobile access has been already made pretty seamless with the best terminals. Today mobile networks and WLAN network infrastructure have pretty much nothing in common. My prediction is that this will change as the WLAN gets classified as operator friendly technology.

THROUGHPUT, THROUGHPUT!
WLAN technology nicely complements mobile networks if operators let it do that. WLAN has outnumbered mobile (2G, 3G, LTE etc) technologies in data performance always as it has existed. It is also clearly deemed to maintain the lead also in the future as it already starts to move to Gigabit speeds in standardization (802.11ac). 802.11n compliant devices available commonly off-the-shelf already today provide about 150Mbit/s practical uplink and downlink throughputs with few ms delays. As a comparison, HSPA+ offers about 15Mbit/s downlink and 3Mbit/s uplink speeds with about 10x round trip delays compared to 802.11n. Yes, coverage of WLAN access point is of course much smaller. But when wide area networks run out of capacity, network planners need to degrade cell size there remarkably and then it becomes comparable to WLAN. Why not to use them in parallel already now?
Maximum speed/throughput is often used as indicator of quality in marketing messages. However, this is only a fraction of quality of experience. Outside lack of radio capacity and transport capacity to carry all data, mobile networks traditionally suffer from high delay (latency). This causes slowness even to some low bandwidth applications, but less so with the recent technologies like HSPA+ and LTE.

WLAN suffers from its own issues. Use of WLAN frequencies is not regulated and typically not either coordinated even within buildings. This leads to interference degrading performance and causing even complete service outages. Practices to manage wireless environment differ quite a bit from wired networks. IT organizations have not been fast enough to build wireless network competence for their people. It has painfully common to learn that network equipment rather often have implementation faults (bugs) that require a patch from vendor. Overall, managing WLAN has been a challenge, since end users call in and complain about poor service despite all available network statistics show green.

WIRELESS VOIP, CUT YOUR PHONE BILL
VoIP is increasingly used with WLAN (Vo-Fi, Vo Wi-Fi). With LTE (4G) mobile technologies, voice will anyway go VoIP only. VoIP has long time been a big promise, but wireless VoIP tornado has not yet happened.

There are numerous software clients that make mobile terminal a VoIP phone. There is also an increasing amount single mode VoIP over WLAN terminals used for example in hospitals. As hospitals require WLAN for data applications, why to build an overlapping DECT network there anymore? Large international enterprises are pretty keen on lowering their employee phones bills, that easily exceed 200€ per month on average. Billing is largely generated from international mobile phone calls between company offices. This is of course bread and butter for operators and loosing this would mean a dip in revenues. Some operators have taken a time-out by blocking out VoIP traffic completely and fiercely think what to do about it. History has shown that this approach will not prevent future happening, but may of course delay it.

The smartest always use discontinuities somehow for their benefit and get the lead. VoIP over WLAN is known to be sensitive for lacking network performance and thus having room for improvement in quality. As VoIP over wireless will happen for sure (there are no alternatives, really), it makes sense to take lead with it. Quality and usability are to be solved to unleash this next tornado. Could Nokia hit back Apple by becoming the company that made this happen?

ENTERPRISE WLAN IS ON THE MOVE
Recent analyst reports predict that WLAN will continue to enter Enterprise sector. According to IDC (June 29, 2010) Enterprise WLAN Market to Grow 23% and Reach $2.1 Billion in 2010. According to ABI Research (June 29, 2010) in the past 12 months, WLAN implementation in healthcare environments has grown by 60 percent. ABI reports that hospitals need more coverage and capacity to support such functions as real-time location systems, patient monitoring, telemedicine and connectivity of mobile devices. Dell’Oro (Feb 11, 2010) reports that enterprise segment is the strongest growing area over the next five years. IDC and Aberdeen (April 2009) highlight that WLAN has moved from nice to have to essential to have/business critical role.

Enterprises will be wireless and WLAN (802.11) is the technology enabling that. There are no serious alternatives during the next ten years. Need for LAN switching will from now on start to decrease. VoIP over wireless will replace circuit switched traditional mobile calls. WLAN and mobile networks will need to converge, finally. As the applications move to cloud, networks have to be faster and more reliable than ever.

Veli-Pekka Ketonen/CTO