“Professional” WiFi on the move

Stephen Rayment, Head of Technology for Wi-Fi Products at Ericsson, (former CTO of Belair Networks) gave an interesting exposé at the Johannesberg Summit of what is going on in the “professional” (“carrier”) WiFi scene and what developments to expect. Have a look at the video to get updated in a hurry. One take-away is that the two communities (“the RAN-heads” in 3GPP and the “Net-heads” in IEEE 802.11) need to get their act together. Stephen pointed out the huge spectrum advantage of “WiFi” – almost 500 MHz och coordinated spectrum around the world in 2.4 and 5 GHz, but also the “fixation” of the 802.11 community with single user peak rates and the difficulties for this community to make reasonable performance comparisons for dense deployments in terms of area capacity. He also gave a glimpse of what goes on in the 802.11 High Efficiency Wireless (HEW) standardization group that is expected address the area capacity issues and to deliver the 802.11ax standard by 2018.