Wi-Fi is critical to enterprise 5G deployments – WBA report

The

(WBA) has released a white paper highlighting the importance of 5G and Wi-Fi convergence in the deployment of

seamless, access-agnostic connectivity for enterprise organisations.

The report, Private 5G and Wi-Fi Convergence: Key Use Cases and Requirements, outlines the critical role new and existing Wi-Fi infrastructure is expected to play in maximising the potential of 5G.

It notes that “the need for private Wi-Fi networks in enterprise is growing due to the arrival of new IoT use cases, but there is also a case to be made for businesses having their own private Wi-Fi solution separate from the network their customers and visitors use. It is expected the Wi-Fi data accounted for 50% of business internet traffic by end of 2023.”

According to the report, spearheaded by WBA members Cisco and HPE Aruba Networking, Wi-Fi is already the incumbent network in the majority of enterprises, and the near-term benefits afforded by 5G depend on an organisation’s ability to integrate it with new and existing Wi-Fi capabilities, eventually moving to a fully converged platform that offers enhanced and admin-free user roaming.

There is already mature deployed infrastructure in enterprise around identity management, authentication, and policy and management, and insertion of private 5G (P5G) into this environment requires reusing this, rather than using a parallel infrastructure.

“Enterprise network architectures are highly complex and have been evolved and refined over a long period of time to support a variety of access technologies, including Wi-Fi and Ethernet,” says Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the Wireless Broadband Alliance. “Private 5G can quickly and cost-effectively leverage this foundation as one of a suite of access technologies that enterprises can use to address their requirements.”

P5G networks allow the owners to provide priority access or licensing for their wireless spectrum, giving the enterprise more control over their network capacity, and services, without having to depend on carriers’ availability or plans. It can use licensed, unlicensed, or shared spectrum and can be deployed, managed, and scaled by the owner, or by a service provider.

According to the WBA, mobility, reliability, determinism, ultra-low-latency and security are the key drivers for Wi-Fi adoption in enterprise networks.

The report highlights how Wi-Fi (with Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7) will continue to play an important role in enterprise connectivity, creating new opportunities for businesses in different industries, from augmented reality (AR) in education, to new mission-critical applications such as chemical leak detection or water level and flood management.

Many regulators are actively considering enabling private use of the cellular spectrum. For this 5G adoption to be successful, the paper explained, convergence with Wi-Fi 6E and other enterprise elements for realizing an access-agnostic service layer with improved user experience will be something enterprises cannot afford to overlook.

Wi-Fi 6E provides a host of advanced, enterprise-grade capabilities on the 6GHz spectrum, such as deterministic quality of service (QoS) and multi-gigabit throughput. These already perfectly aligned with several 5G service profiles designed specifically for enterprise applications, including factory automation, smart metering, mining, venue hosting, fault management, and surveillance.

Stuart Strickland, Wireless CTO, HPE Aruba Networking, says: “We are delighted to see an industry consensus emerge around the convergence and integration of enterprise Wi-Fi and private 5G. By focusing specifically on enterprise network requirements, this report looks beyond both the hype and sectarian squabbles of rival technologies to identify practical solutions to critical business problems."

The paper outlines four possible deployment models for bringing 5G into enterprise networks, as well as the key considerations for choosing each one:

• On-premises core network and application services
  Data sovereignty, site resiliency, and application latency requirements are ensured by keeping all traffic on-prem. Access to conventional enterprise cloud-based applications is enabled, subject to normal limitations around resiliency and latency.
• On-premises user plane and application services
  The paper outlines several potentially good reasons to move the control plane to the cloud, such as the need for control plane aggregation in a multi-site 5G core network deployment. All other 5G elements and the application services are on-premises, except the 5G control plane elements.
• Cloud-based core network and application services
  User plane traffic from 5G devices will always have to enter the cloud. In such deployment models, it may be possible to move the 5G core network and user plane elements to the cloud where the applications services are located.
• The hybrid model - There are some application services in the cloud, and some are on-prem. To support such a model, there can be two different Data Network Names (DNN’s), one for supporting applications that are on-premises and another for supporting applications in the cloud.