The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 802.11 Standard, better known to most end users as Wi-Fi brand name, is a remarkable technology for two basic reasons.
First, as it turns 25-years-old, the standard’s original use case has given way to its current role as a near-ubiquitous enabler of wireless, local Internet access, changing our personal and professional lives along the way.
Second, thanks to ongoing enhancements the standard will play crucial roles in location services, the nascent “Internet of Things” and applications as yet unimagined.
It is instructive to look at how Wi-Fi has insinuated itself into our lives, because understanding Wi-Fi’s birth and growth helps illustrate both its continued relevance and its rich future potential.
In the late 1980s, the Federal Communications Commission opened the 2.4-2.5 GHz spectrum band for non-licensed applications. The IEEE Standards Association subsequently pursued a standard that linked wireless communications and networking infrastructure. Work began in 1990 on developing interoperable wireless standards that enabled a data rate of more than 1 megabit per second.
Initially, the IEEE 802.11 protocol aimed for use in retail point-of-sale terminals. As laptops, then smartphones reached market, the protocol’s use cases expanded to enable wireless LAN connections, first for email and data, then for the Internet.
IEEE 802.11 was published in June 1997, and within two years the Wi-Fi Alliance was founded. The alliance branded the protocol “Wi-Fi” and imagined use cases that have contributed to further applications. The result has been near-ubiquitous global uptake for personal productivity, communications and entertainment on-the-go. Wi-Fi hot spots in public spaces are touted as differentiators that influence our choices of where to hang out, where to shop and where to stay.
Deloitte has found two-thirds of U.S. consumers prefer Wi-Fi to cellular connectivity. Jupiter Research forecasts that in four years up to 60% of all mobile data transfers globally will be transported over Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi’s success and other drivers have led to further enhancements to this standard that will result in new innovations and more compelling customer experiences.
Ever-denser deployment of devices on a single point of access has led to work on the proposed amendment IEEE P802.11ax, which is designed to enhance the protocol’s speed and its efficiency for dense wireless LAN deployments in crowded public spaces. (The goal is a more than 10,000-fold increase over the standard’s initial data rate.) This enhancement essentially orchestrates myriad users in a high-density environment to maximize available bandwidth.
Another enhancement – IEEE P802.11ah – is designed to enable two-way data transfers between devices over greater distances than is possible today. This “extended range” capability will enable IoT devices to “talk” to each other, useful in smart homes, businesses and cities.
The IEEE P802.11ay enhancement operates in the 60 GHz band, which offers high throughput over very short distances of about 10 meters or less. It extends the existing IEEE 802.11ad-2012 Standard. As demand for wireless throughput increases, these higher frequency bands will become increasingly attractive because of the high throughput they offer and the opportunities for spatial multiplexing (i.e., non-interference between nearby devices).
Finally, we have IEEE P802.11az, which addresses location-based services. Today, Wi-Fi can infer your indoor location based on measuring varying distances to access points, but it’s accurate only to within five meters. Current work in IEEE P802.11 (revision) enables location services with accuracy down to roughly two or three meters. Using IEEE P802.11az we may be able to provide location within centimeters, improving scalability and adding a new feature of being able to determine direction. Improved accuracy in location is certain to spawn intriguing innovations. This development illustrates an important aspect of 802.11’s evolution, which is that we’re not entirely certain at this point what future use cases will look like, but we’re quite certain that application developers will create an array of them.
The history of IEEE 802.11 provides a clear example of the value of an open and transparent standards process that enables evolution in various directions, in many cases for proverbial killer apps that we could not foresee when we initially wrote the standard. In IEEE 802.11’s specific case, we had a modest vision for use cases that exploded over time. That virtuous process continues today, creating new customer experiences and new value streams. In a few short years, we’ll wonder how we ever lived without them.
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