To find out what new perspectives this new year holds, Ruckus Wireless, a supplier of wireless systems, has prepared a series of predictions about the main challenges and opportunities of 2015 in both Wi-Fi for businesses and for suppliers.
• 2015 will be the year of 802.11ac. For some time now, the consumer market has been accelerating its adoption of this technology. The adoption of 11ac consumer smart devices, along with the continued growth of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), is forcing organizations to increasingly migrate to this infrastructure. Furthermore, Wave 2 will be the next standard for service providers and will be launched in 2015. This new standard includes multi-user, or multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) connectivity, allowing a Wi-Fi access point to communicate with more than one user simultaneously.
• WLAN monetization. Today, organizations have the option of adding services such as analytics, location tracking, advertising, and marketing as new ways to monetize their operations. These services can greatly benefit organizations and help them better understand fundamental aspects such as WLAN trends, customer movements, and demographics. This year, we will see continued growth in these new ways to monetize investments in Wi-Fi infrastructure.
The ongoing cost reductions in data centers continue to drive demand for virtualization. For Wi-Fi, virtualization offers an additional layer of resilience that is tied to the high-availability data center model. Virtualization also reduces CAPEX for many technologies, paving the way for managed services.
• The cloud will continue to provide value-added services to vendors (VARs) with easy-to-deploy services for customers who prefer Wi-Fi as a service. Small businesses will be able to receive enterprise technology such as location-based services (LBS) and secure guest access.
• Hotspot 2.0 technology (e.g., Passpoint) will continue to be adopted by vertical markets that provide Wi-Fi access, such as healthcare and transportation, as well as enterprises in general. With Hotspot 2.0, customers will be able to experience more seamless and secure Wi-Fi roaming. In addition, large-scale Hotspot 2.0 roaming consortia will begin to form next year, primarily around major cable operators. These will weave together the islands of connectivity that constantly surround us, transforming them into a simple and secure network experience.
• Home-spots will become the standard offering from wireless providers worldwide. This approach will dramatically increase Wi-Fi presence and, therefore, enhance the utility of these offerings.
“Wi-Fi will continue to have a major impact on consumers, companies, public spaces, and service providers of all kinds in 2015. One of the reasons is the smartphone revolution, which will continue to transform the wireless landscape as users in all countries and from all socioeconomic groups continue to use and acquire them. Wi-Fi has practically become a public utility,” commented Óscar Vigo, Sales Director of Ruckus Wireless in Spain.
