5GLAN > Wi-Fi?

Yesterday Ekahau officially released their new Private LTE/5G cellular planning tool, which sits right alongside the offering from Hamina. This isn’t a post about either… only that they both now have a private LTE/5G planning tool.

And that, to me, is the interesting part…

The money and effort that goes into creating these tools is no small thing, so why would ‘Wi-Fi’ tool vendors suddenly start creating tools for things that we’re not using or doing yet… do they know something we (royal ‘we’ here… I actually mean ‘I’) don’t?

To a certain extent, I think ‘we’ do know that private 5G is going to be massive. ‘We’ know the very real limitations of Wi-Fi. ‘We’ know that Wi-Fi was born as a consumer-grade solution that we’ve managed to shoehorn into compliance, but with our ever-increasing wireless clients and capacity demands, either Wi-Fi has to change how it works drastically or something else will have to step in the provide the solution to an ever-growing problem.

And history matters here… Wi-Fi is cheap! Free spectrum, ubiquitous clients, multiple vendors battling to innovate and beat each other on price… Wi-Fi was attractive to the enterprise because it could easily be spun up and added to the existing network infrastructure. This has not historically been the case for cellular. Cellular has traditionally been the domain of the few… in terms of the operators.

So what’s changed? Well, a few things…

• Everyone lives on their phones…

• More people are using cellular-enabled devices (tablets, laptops)

• And now… cellular infrastructure and spectrum are cheap and easy to configure (and now design… thanks to Hamina, Ekahau & Celona)

So where do ‘we’ see cellular taking over Wi-Fi?

For me… it’s in places where an SLA is essential. The main difference between Wi-Fi and cellular is that cellular is scheduled via the infrastructure. It’s the one thing that Wi-Fi will never be able to compete with… because it wasn’t designed that way.

So if you think about manufacturing, warehousing, hospitals, and anywhere that will use automation of any kind, they all rely on data being transmitted without delay… that kind of SLA isn’t achievable with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is great for applications that don’t rely on latency; for those that do… Private cellular will be only answer.

So will your office have private 5G in the near future? Probably… if management wants to ensure those Webex and Teams calls are flawless… but I see private cellular being ESSENTIAL in those businesses that will use any sort of robotics and automation.

Luckily, cellular, which used to be available to only a few, is now available for all.