Tag: 802.11ax

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The Industry

5G vs. WiFi

The big cellular carriers envision a future where every smart device is connected to their cellular networks rather than to WiFi. They envision every home having to pay a monthly subscription to maintain connectivity for their wired devices. They envision every new car and truck coming with a subscription to cellular service.

I notice that the cellular providers talk about generating IoT revenues, but they’re never specific that the real vision is for everybody to buy additional cellular subscriptions. Most IoT applications will be low-bandwidth yet the carriers have been spreading the false message that 5G is all about faster broadband. I just saw another ludicrous article yesterday predicting how 5G was going to bring mobile gigabit broadband to rural America – a pure fantasy that is being fed by the public relations machines at Verizon and AT&T.

We aren’t seeing much press about the most important aspect of the new 5G specifications – that each cell site will be able to make up to 100,000 simultaneous connections. This isn’t being done for cellphones. It’s rare these days except in a few over-crowded places for a cellular call not to be connected. Placing a few small cell sites at the busiest places in most cities could solve most cellular bottlenecks without an upgrade to 5G.

The 100,000 connections give the wireless carriers the tool that can make a connection to every smart TV, smart washer and dryer, home video camera, burglar alarm sensor and every other wired device in a home. The big carriers are launching a direct challenge to WiFi as the wireless technology of choice for connecting our devices.

AT&T and Verizon envision every home having a new $10, $20 or $30 subscription to keep all of the devices connected. They also envision becoming the repository of all IoT data – moving them in front of Google and others in the chase for collecting the big data that drives advertising revenues. This is something they definitely don’t talk about.

It doesn’t take much of a thought exercise to understand that 5G is not about faster cellular service. Cellular subscribers will gladly take faster cellular broadband, but they probably aren’t willing to pay more for it. T-Mobile is already making that clear by announcing that they won’t charge more for 5G. The carriers are not going to spend tens of billions to implement 5G cellular technology that doesn’t drive the new revenues needed to pay for it. 5G is about IoT, plain and simple.

Today all of our home devices use WiFi. While WiFi is far from perfect, it seems to do an adequate job in connecting to the video camera at the front door, the smart TV, and the sensors in various appliances and devices around the home. WiFi has a few major advantages over cellular broadband – it’s already in our homes and connected to our devices and doesn’t require an additional monthly subscription.

I think people will resist another forced subscription. HP recently reported that the vast majority of their customers that buy 4G LTE-enabled laptops disable the cellular connection almost as soon as the new computer is out of the box. In this day of cellphones, very few car owners sign-up for the cellular subscription for OnStar when the free trial expires. I know that I personally would not buy a home device that eventually needed another cellular subscription to function.

The cellular carriers make a valid point in saying that WiFi is already growing inadequate for busy homes. But there are already short-term and long-term fixes on the way. The short-term fix is the upcoming migration to WiFi 6 using the 802.11ax standard. The new WiFi will better use MIMO antennas, frequency slicing and other techniques to allow for prioritization of devices and a more reliable connection to multiple devices.

The ultimate indoor broadband network will be a combination of WiFi and millimeter wave, or even faster spectrum. Higher frequency spectrum could provide bandwidth for the devices that use big bandwidth while keeping other devices on mid-range spectrum WiFi – getting the best from both sets of spectrum. That combination will allow for the easy integration, without interference for the connection of gigabit devices and also of tiny sensors that only communicate sporadically.

This is not the future that AT&T and Verizon want, because this is a world controlled by consumers who buy the wireless boxes that best suit them. I envision a future indoor-only wireless network that won’t require licensed spectrum or a cellular subscription since the millimeter waves and other higher frequencies won’t pass outdoors through walls.

The cellular carriers will have a monopoly on the outdoor sensor market. They will undoubtedly make the connections to smart cars, to smart agriculture, and to outdoor smart city sensors. But I think they will have a huge uphill battle convincing households to pay another monthly subscription for something that can be done better using a few well-placed routers.

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The Industry

Telecom Predictions for 2019

It’s that time of year when I look forward at what the next year might bring to the industry. I see the following as the biggest telecom trends for 2019:

5G Will Not Save the World (or the Industry). This will be the year when we will finally stop seeing headlines about how 5G will transform society. There will be almost no actual introduction of 5G in networks, but we’ll still see numerous press releases by the big ISPs crowing about fictional 5G achievements.

CAF II Buildout Nearly Complete, but Few Notice. The CAF II upgrades will not have the impact hoped for by the FCC. Many areas that should have gotten speed increases to at least 10/1 Mbps will get something less, but nobody will officially monitor or note it. Households that buy the upgrades to 10/1 will still feel massively underserved since those speeds are already seriously obsolete.

People Will Wonder Why They Bought 5G Cellphones and 802.11ax Routers. The wireless carriers will begin charging premium prices for 5G-capable cellular phone yet there will be no 5G cell sites deployed. Households will upgrade to 802.11ax WiFi routers without realizing that there are no compatible devices in the home. Both sets of customers will feel cheated since there will be zero improvement in performance. Yet we’ll still see a few articles raving about the performance of each technology.

FCC Will Continue to Work Themselves out of the Regulatory Business. The current FCC will continue on the path to deregulate the large carriers to the fullest extent possible. They will continue to slant every decision in the direction of the big ISPs while claiming that every decision helps rural broadband.

Rural America Will Realize that Nobody is Coming to Help. I predict that hundreds of rural communities will finally realize that nobody is bringing them broadband. I expect many more communities to begin offering money for public/private partnerships as they try desperately to not fall on the wrong side of the broadband divide.

Broadband Prices Start to Climb. 2019 will be the first year that the world will notice the big ISP strategy to significantly increase broadband prices. We saw the first indication in November when Charter increased bundled broadband prices by $5 per month – the biggest broadband price increase in my memory. All the big ISPs are hoping to have broadband prices to $90 within 5 – 7 years.

Corporate Lobbyists Will Drive Policy. In 2018 there were numerous FCC decisions that came straight from the pens of telecom lobbyists. In 2019 those lobbyists will drive state and federal telecom legislation and FCC decisions.

Comcast and Charter Continue to Eat into Cellular Market. These two cable companies will quietly, yet significantly begin eating into the cellular markets in urban areas. I still don’t expect a major reaction by the cellar companies, but by 2020 we should start seeing cellular prices take another tumble.

Household Bandwidth Usage Will Continue to Grow. There will be no slowdown in the growth of household broadband as homes add many more bandwidth-capable devices to their homes. Another few million customers will cut the cable TV cord and ratchet up bandwidth usage. Online programming will routinely first offer 4K video and we’ll see the first commercial 8K video online.

We’ll See First Significant Launches of LEO Satellites. There will be little public notice since the early market entries will not be selling rural broadband but will be supporting corporate WANs, cellular transport and the development of outer space networks between satellites.

25 New Online Programmers Emerge. There will be a flood of new online programming options as numerous companies jump into the market. We won’t see many, and possibly no failures this year, but within a few years the market reality will drive out companies that can’t gain enough market share.

Transport Price Pressure Tightens. Anybody selling transport to cellular companies will see big pressure to lower prices. Those who ignore the pressure will find out that the carriers are willing to build fiber to bypass high costs.

Big Companies Will Get Most New Spectrum. The biggest ISPs and cellular carriers will still gobble up the majority of new spectrum, meaning improved spectrum utilization for urban markets while rural America will see nearly zero benefits.

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Technology

How Much Better is 802.11ax?

The new WiFi standard 802.11ax is expected to be ratified and released as a standard sometime next year. In the new industry nomenclature this now be called WiFi-6. A lot of the woes we have today with bandwidth in our home is due to the current 802.11ac standard that this will be replacing. 802.11ax will introduce a number of significant improvements that ought to improve home WiFi performance.

To understand why these improvements are important we need to first understand the shortcomings of the current WiFi protocols. The industry groups that developed the current WiFi standards had no idea that WiFi would become so prevalent and that the average home might have dozens of WiFi capable devices. The current problems all arise from a WiFi router trying to satisfy multiple demands for a data stream from multiple devices. Unlike cellular technologies, WiFi has no central traffic cop and every device in the environment can make an equal claim for connectivity. When a WiFi router has more demands for usage than it has available channels it pauses and interrupts all data streams until it chooses how to reallocate bandwidth. In a busy environment these stops and restarts can be nearly continuous.

The improvements from 802.11ax will all come from smarter ways to handle requests for connectivity from multiple devices. There is only a small improvement in overall bandwidth with a raw physical data rate of 500 Mbps compared to 422 for 802.11ac. Here are the major new innovations:

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). This improvement will likely have the biggest impact in a home. OFDMA can slice the few big existing WiFi channels into smaller channels, being called resource units. A router will be able to make multiple smaller bandwidth connections using resource units and avoid packet collision and the start/stop cycle of each device asking for primary connectivity.

Bi-Directional Multi-User MIMO. In the last few years we’ve seen home WiFi routers introduce MIMO, which uses multiple antennas to make connections to different devices. This solves one of the problems of WiFi by allowing multiple devices to download separate data streams at the same time without interference. But today’s WiFi MIMO still has one big problem in that the MIMO only work for downloading. Whenever there is a request for any device to use a channel for uploading, today’s MIMO pauses all the downloading streams. Bi-Directional MIMO will allow for 2-way data streams meaning that a request to upload won’t kill downstream transmissions.

Spatial Frequency Reuse. This will have the most benefit in apartments or in homes that have networked multiple WiFi routers. Today a WiFi transmission will pause for any request for connection, even for connections made to a neighbor’s router from the neighbor’s devices. Spatial Frequency Reuse doesn’t fix that problem, but it allows neighboring 802.11.ax routers to coordinate and to adjust the power of transmission requests to increase the chance that a device can connect to and maintain a connection to the proper router.

Target Wake Time. This will allow small devices to remain silent most of the time and only communicate at specific and pre-set times. Today a WiFi router can’t distinguish between a request from a smart blender and a smart TV, and requests from multiple small devices can badly interfere with the streams we care about to big devices. This feature will reduce, and distribute over time the requests for connectivity from the ever-growing horde of small devices we all have.

There’s no rush to go out and buy and 802.11ax router, although tech stores will soon be pushing them. Like all generations of WiFi they will be backwards compatible with earlier WiFi standards, but for a few years they won’t do anything differently than your current router. This is because all of the above features require updated WiFi edge devices that also contain the new 802.11ax standard. There won’t be many devices manufactured with the new standard even in 2019. Even after we introduce 802.11ax devices into our home we’ll continue to be frustrated since our older WiFi edge devices will continue to communicate in the same inefficient way as today.

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Technology

The Future of WiFi

There are big changes coming over the next few years with WiFi. At the beginning of 2017 a study by Parks Associates showed that 71% of broadband homes now use WiFi to distribute the signal – a percentage that continues to grow. New home routers now use the 802.11ac standard, although there are still plenty of homes running the older 802.11n technology.

But there is still a lot of dissatisfaction with WiFi and many of my clients tell me that most of the complaints they get about broadband connections are due to WiFi issues. These ISPs deliver fast broadband to the home only to see WiFi degrading the customer experience. But there are big changes coming with the next generation of WiFi that ought to improve the performance of home WiFi networks. The next generation of WiFi devices will be using the 802.11ax standard and we ought to start seeing devices using the standard by early 2019.

There are several significant changes in the 802.11ax standard that will improve the customer WiFi experience. First is the use of a wider spectrum channel at 160 MHz, which is four times larger than the channels used by 802.11ac. A bigger channel means that data can be delivered faster, which will solve many of the deficiencies of current WiFi home networks. This will improve the network performance using the brute strength approach of pushing more data through a connection faster.

But probably more significant is the use in 802.11ax of 4X4 MIMO (multiple input / multiple output) antennas. These new antennas will be combined with orthogonal frequency division multiple access (ODMFA). Together these new technologies will provide for multiple and separate data streams within a WiFi network. In layman’s terms think of the new technology as operating four separate WiFi networks simultaneously. By distributing the network load to separate channels the interference on any given channel will decrease.

Reducing interference is important because that’s the cause of a lot of the woes of current WiFi networks. The WiFi standard allows for unlimited access to a signal and every device within the range of a WiFi network has an equal opportunity to grab the WiFi network. It is this open sharing that lets us connect lots of different devices easily to a WiFi network.

But the sharing has a big downside. A WiFi network shares signals by shutting down when it gets more than one request for a signal. The network pauses for a short period of time and then bursts energy to the first network it notices when it reboots. In a busy WiFi environment the network stops and starts often causing the total throughput on the network to drop significantly.

But with four separate networks running at the same time there will be far fewer stops and starts and a user on any one channel should have a far better experience than today. Further, with the ODMFA technology the data from multiple devices can coexist better, meaning that a WiFi router can better handle more than one device at the same time, further reducing the negative impacts of completing signals. The technology lets the network smoothly mix signals from different devices to avoid network stops and starts.

The 802.11ax technology ought to greatly improve the home WiFi experience. It will have bigger channels, meaning it can send and receive data to WiFi connected devices faster. And it will use the MIMO antennas to make separate connections with devices to limit signal collision.

But 802.11ax is not the last WiFi improvement we will see. Japanese scientists have made recent breakthroughs in using what is called the TeraHertz range of frequency – spectrum greater than 300 GHz per second. They’ve used the 500 GHz band to create a 34 Gbps WiFi connection. Until now work in these higher frequencies have been troublesome because the transmission distances for data transmission has been limited to extremely short distances of a few centimeters.

But the scientists have created an 8-array antenna that they think can extent the practical reach of fast WiFi to as much as 30 feet – more than enough to create blazingly fast WiFi in a room. These frequencies will not pass through barriers and would require a small transmitter in each room. But the scientists believe the transmitters and receivers can be made small enough to fit on a chip – making it possible to affordably put the chips into any device including cell phones. Don’t expect multi-gigabit WiFi for a while. But it’s good to know that scientists are working a generation or two ahead on technologies that we will eventually want.

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Technology

The Future of WiFi

There are a lot of near-term improvements planned for WiFi. The IEEE 802.11 Working Group (part of the Wi-Fi Alliance) has a number of improvements being planned. Many, but not all of the improvements, look at the future of using the newly available millimeter wave spectrum.

It’s been twenty years since the first WiFi standard was approved. I remember how great it felt about fifteen years ago when Verizon gave me a WiFi modem as part of my new FiOS service. Up until then my computing had always been tied to cables and it was so freeing to use a laptop anywhere in the house (although that first generation WiFi didn’t do a great job of penetrating the plaster walls in my old house).

Here are some of the improvements being considered:

802.11ax. The goal of this next-gen WiFi is to enable speeds up to 10 Gbps using the 5 GHz band of free WiFi spectrum. The standard also seeks to provide more bandwidth in the 2.4 GHz band. The developing new standard is looking at the use of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), multi-user MIMO and other technology improvements to squeeze more bandwidth out of the currently available WiFi frequency.

Interestingly, this standard only calls for an improvement of about 37% over today’s 802.11ac technology, but the various improvement in the way the spectrum is used will hopefully mean about a four times greater delivery of bandwidth.

Probably the biggest improvement with this standard is the ability to connect efficiently to a greater number of devices. At first this will make 802.11ax WiFi more useful in crowded environments like stadiums and other public places. But the real benefit is to make WiFi the go-to spectrum for use for the Internet of Things. There is a huge race going on between WiFi and cellular technologies to grab the majority of that exploding market. For now, for indoor uses WiFi has the lead and most IoT devices today are WiFi connected. But today’s WiFi networks can get bogged down when there are too many simultaneous requests for connections. We’ll have to wait to see if the changes to the standards improve WiFi enough to keep in ahead in the IoT race.

Of course, the 10 GHz speed is somewhat theoretical in it would provide all of the bandwidth to one device that was located close the transmitter – but the overall improvement in bandwidth promises to be dramatic. This new standard is expected to be finalized by 2019, but there will probably be new hardware that incorporates some of the planned upgrades by 2018.

802.11ay. 802.11ay is the successor to 802.11ad, which never got any market traction. These two standards utilize the 60 GHz spectrum and are intended to deliver big amounts of bandwidth for short distances, such as inside a room. This new standard promises to improve short-range bandwidth up to 20 Gbps, about a three times improvement over 802.11ad. The new standard might have the same market acceptance issues if most users are satisfied instead with 802.11ax. The primary improvements over 802.11ad are the addition of MIMO antennas with up to four simultaneous data streams.

802.11az. The earlier two improvements discussed above are aimed at improving bandwidth to WiFi users. The 802.11az standard instead looks at ways to improve the location and positioning of users on a WiFi network. Since many of the improvements in WiFi use MIMO (multiple input multiple output) antennas, system performance is improved significantly if the WiFi router can accurately and quickly keep track of the precise location of each user on the WiFi network. That’s a relatively simple task in a static environment of talking to fixed-location devices like a TV or appliances, but much harder to do with mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, etc. Improvements in locating technology allows a WiFi network to more quickly track and connect to a device without having to waste frequency resources to first find the device before each transmission.

The other big improvement promised by this standard is increased energy efficiency of the network. As the network becomes adroit at identifying and remembering the location of network devices, the standard allows for WiFi devices to shut down and go to sleep and drop off the network when not in use, saving energy for devices like IoT sensors. The WiFi hub and sensor devices can be ‘scheduled’ to connect at fixed times allowing for devices to save power by sleeping in between connections.

These changes are necessary to keep WiFi useful and relevant. The number of devices that are going to be connected to WiFi is expected to continue to grow at exponential rates, and today’s WiFi can bog down under heavy use, as anybody who tries to use WiFi in a business hotel understands. But a lot of the problems with today’s WiFi can be fixed with the combination of faster data throughput along with tweaks that reduce the problems caused by interference among devices trying to gain the attention of the hug modem. The various improvements planned by the IEEE Working Group are addressing all of these issues.

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Technology

A New WiFi Standard

There is a new version of WiFi coming soon that ought to solve some of the major problems with using WiFi in the home and in busy environments. The new standard has been labeled as 802.11ax and should start shipping in new routers by the end of this year and start appearing in devices in early 2018.

It’s the expected time for a new standard since there has been a new one every four or five years. 802.11a hit the market in 1999, 802.11g in 2003, 802.11n in 2009 and 802.11ac in 2013.

One of the most interesting thing about this new standard is that it’s a hardware upgrade and not a real change in the standards. It will be backwards compatible with earlier versions of 802.11, but both the router and the end devices must be upgraded to use the new standard. This means that business travelers are going to get frustrated when visiting hotels without the new routers.

One improvement is that the new routers will treat the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrums as one big block of spectrum, making it more likely to find an open channel. Most of today’s routers make you pick one band or the other.

Another improvement in 801.11ax is that the routers will have more antennas in the array, making it possible to connect with more devices at the same time. It’s also going to use MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antenna arrays, allowing it to identify individual users and to establish fixed links to them. A lot of the problems in current WiFi routers come when routers get overwhelmed with more requests for service than the number of antennas that are available.

In addition to more signal paths the biggest improvement will be that the new 801.22ax routers will be able to better handle simultaneous requests for use of a single channel. The existing 802.11 standards are designed to share spectrum and when a second request is made to use a busy channel, the first transmission is stopped while the router decides which stream to satisfy – and this keep repeating as the router bounces back and forth between the two users. This is not a problem when there are only a few requests for simultaneous use, but in a crowded environment the constant stopping and starting of the router results in a lot of the available spectrum going unused and in nobody receiving a sustained signal.

The new 802.11ax routers will use OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiplying) to allow multiple users to simultaneously use the same channel without the constant stopping and starting at each new request for service. A hotel with a 100 Mbps backbone might theoretically be able to allow 20 users to each receive a 5 Mbps stream from a single WiFi channel. No wireless system will be quite that efficient, but you get the idea. A router with 802.11ax can still get overwhelmed, but it takes a lot more users to get to that condition.

We’ll have to wait and see how that works in practice. Today, if you visit a busy business hotel where there might be dozens of devices trying to use the bandwidth, the constant stopping and starting of the WiFi signal usually results in a large percentage of the bandwidth not being given to any user – it’s lost during the on/off sequences. But the new standard will give everybody an equal share of the bandwidth until all of the bandwidth is used or until it runs out of transmitter antennas.

The new standard also allows for scheduling connections between the router and client devices. This means more efficient use of spectrum since the devices will be ready to burst data when scheduled. This will allow devices like cellphones to save battery power by ‘resting’ when not transmitting since they save on making unneeded requests for connection.

All these various changes also mean that the new routers will use only about one-third the energy of current routers. Because the router can establish fixed streams with a given user it can avoid the constant off/off sequences.

The most interesting downside to the new devices will be that their biggest benefits only kick in when most of the connected devices are using the new standard. This means that the benefits on public networks might not be noticeable for the first few years until a significant percentage of cellphones, tablets, and laptops have been upgraded to the new standard.

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Current News Technology

Maybe Finally a Faster WiFi

The first wave of 802.11ac WiFi routers are starting to show up in use and already there is something faster on the horizon. IEEE has announced that they are starting to work on a new standard named 802.11ax and it looks like the new standard might be able to deliver on some of the hype and promises that were mistakenly made about 802.11ac. This new standard probably is not going to be released until 2018.

I call it unfortunate because 802.11ac has widely been referred to as gigabit WiFi but it is not even close to that. In the real world application of the technology it’s been reported that the ac routers can improve performance over today’s 802.11n routers by between 50% and 100%. That is a significant improvement and it is shame that the marketing hype of the companies that push the technology has created an unfulfillable expectation for these routers. I refer you to my earlier blog that compares the reality to the hype.

The gigabit name given to 802.11ac has more to do with the increased capacity of the router to handle large bandwidth than it did with the connection speeds to any given device. But the 802.11ax standard is going to turns its attention to increasing the connections to users. The early goal of the new standard is to increase bandwidth to devices by as much as 4 times over what can be delivered with 802.11ac.

This improvement is going to come through the use of MIMO-OFDA. MIMO is multiple input – multiple output and refers to a system that has multiple antennas in the router. Devices can also have multiple antennas although that’s not required. OFDA stands for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and is a standard used in 4G wireless networks today

The combination of those two techniques means that more bits can be forced through a single connection to one device using a single receiving antenna. Making each individual connections from the router more efficient will improve the overall efficiency of the base router.

Interestingly, Huawei is already using these techniques in the lab and they are experiencing raw data rates as fast as 10 gigabits from a router. Huawei is one of the leaders of the 802.11ax standards process and they don’t believe these routers will be market ready until at least 2018

What I find most puzzling in today’s environment is that a lot of vendors have bought hook, line and sinker into the 802.11ac hype . For example, it’s been reported that a number of FTTH vendors and settop box vendors are touting the use of 802.11ac instead of cabling to route TV signals around a home. This might work for single family homes on large lots where there won’t be a lot of interference, but I can foresee many situations where this is going to be a challenge

Certainly there is a lot of chance for interference when you try to do this in an urban environment where living units are crammed a lot closer together. I highlighted some of the forms of WiFi interference in another earlier blog. But there are always other situations where WiFi will not be a great solution for transmitting cable signals between multiple sets. For example, there are plenty of older homes built in the fifties or earlier that have plaster walls with wire mesh lathe which can stop a WiFi signal dead. And there are homes that are larger than the range of the WiFi signal when considering walls and impediments.

But it looks like the 802.11ax standard will finally create enough bandwidth to individual devices to enable WiFi as a reliable alternate to cabling within a house. My fear is that there are going to be so many cases where 802.11ac is a problem that WiFi is going to get a bad name before then. I fear the vendors who are relying on WiFi instead of wires might have been a generation too premature. I hope I’m wrong, but 802.11ac does not look to be enough of an improvement over our current WiFi that it can act as a reliable alternative to wires.

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