Wi-Fi to Exist With 5G in Smart Homes, IHS Told

Wi-Fi will still rule in the smart home in the 5G era, said speakers on a Tuesday IHS Markit webinar. They sought robustness and reliability for good customer experiences.

Laszlo Gyalog, Nokia head-digital home marketing, called 5G and Wi-Fi 6 “perfect complements.” They use the same orthogonal frequency-division multiple access technology to provide low latency. He described a scenario where 5G is used to get broadband to the home, then complemented by Wi-Fi there for the experience customers are used to from billions of Wi-Fi devices.

Enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access drive early investment in 5G networks, said Keith Russell, Nokia head of marketing-fixed wireless access. Citing Ovum, he said FWA is a “blip on the screen” but by 2023, such revenue will be $7.4 billion, or 29 percent of the market. He called eMBB and FWA “early use cases.”

Robustness is key to the success of residential 5G, said Russell. Mobile customers are accustomed to accepting service tradeoffs for the convenience of mobile broadband access wherever they are, and they accept different levels of service based on network coverage as a compromise for the “beauty of mobility.” At home, though, consumers expect a higher-level experience, Russell said. “When you’re talking about using that mobile network for fixed service -- which is an area where the consumer does not make that compromise -- the consumer expects to come home and have the same level of service they had the day before,” he said: “When they turn on the ballgame, the ballgame is there.”

Once 5G's in a household, it has to get around there. That's a challenge for Wi-Fi, said Gyalog, because consumers struggle with Wi-Fi from existing internet providers: “You can buy the most expensive router on the market, install it and still not get the performance you are expecting” due to interference. Other challenges are coverage and complexity. That affects ISPs, which typically get the tech support call regardless of the origin of a network-based problem, Gyalog said. Some 30-50 percent of such requests are Wi-Fi-related, he said. Because support agents have no visibility into the system, a call typically takes 20-30 minutes. Some 10 percent of issues require a truck roll.

In Q&A, Yvon Rouault, 5G solution manager at testing equipment maker Exfo, said a big challenge in ensuring success of 5G-based fixed wireless access services is how mobile operators look at the network: “It’s not anymore the health of the network that’s priority number one. It’s actually what services and quality of service that customers are getting.” While promise of performance is very high with 5G, he said, to generate incremental revenue, “deliver premium-quality services” and track the health of the network, traffic and what each customer gets.