Chandan Mehndiratta, senior director of Cisco’s Enterprise Wireless and Volume Business, shared with RCR Wireless News what the company is most excited about when it comes to Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E and how its working with customers to navigate this technology upgrade.
The below conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Q: From Cisco’s perspective, what does Wi-Fi 6 bring to the table? What about 6E?
Mehndiratta: I am pretty stoked about Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. it gives us the opportunity to bring wireless as the technology for any access mechanism that we want.
The biggest transformation […] is if you look at wireless, it’s like every six months [the standards] are changing. The spectrum opening up [with 6E], the opportunity to talk about different wireless level of technologies not just Wi-Fi, but also Bluetooth Low Energy, IoT, Zigbee. More devices want to connect wirelessly — this is where the transformation is happening.
Wi-Fi 6 is where the determinism part of wireless started happening and that made sure that we were able to handle interference and other challenges that were keeping people from moving from wireless as a ‘nice to have’ to ‘a must have.’ That transition happened with wi-fi 6.
But then think about Wi-Fi 6E. It is a much cleaner spectrum than 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, which helps us grow from a device perspective to a point where we have spectrum-level determinism with almost ultra-reliable connectivity that we could never imagine. In fact, we are able to see connectivity coming in from a wireless perspective up to a Gigabit+ speed. That was not possible in previous generations because of spectrum availability.
6E can enable mission-critical deployments in IoT, healthcare or places you want ultra-low latency, like autonomous vehicles or robotics in a wheelhouse. Because 6 GHz comes with its own spectrum, wireless is behaving like 5G in the sense that this spectrum can be claimed, and AFC [Automatic Frequency Control] comes into play. From a technology perspective, once you get that spectrum assigned, it is yours and what that means is you can now actually run anything on it without contention and get capacities that were not possible in the past.
Q: How do W-Fi 6 & 6E change the ongoing Wi-Fi vs. 5G conversation, particularly in enterprises?
Mehndiratta: Because both of them are wireless and they both have endpoints, some people might wonder why you would pick one over the other. Engagement with our customers shows that 5G has its own merits, mainly around determinism. In the past, Wi-Fi was ‘best effort’ when it came to sending data, but Wi-Fi 6E changes that, as I mentioned, so now, the question is do [Wi-Fi and 5G] overlap? What our customers are teaching us is that they will coexist depending on the technology being used.
It’s important to consider the radio infrastructure investment. Wi-Fi is backward-compatible, so if you replace 2.4, GHz or 5 GHz with 6E infrastructure, you can just start supporting it with the same backend infrastructure; on the other hand, with 5G, you have to start thinking about a new RAN. In some cases, like outdoor locations or factory warehouses, it might make more sense to have RAN instead of having to put a Wi-Fi 6 access point every few feet or so.
Those are some of the cost differences between upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 versus 5G.
But where it becomes more interesting for our customers is looking at how they can achieve a common policy, security, authentication, segmentation of the network irrespective of the technology choice that they made for the endpoint to connect to. That is where Cisco’s strength is. We understand client onboarding whether user or machine, we understand how network segmentation need to work and third, we can give a comprehensive end-to-end view of the entire infrastructure being run as one.
So, depending on the use case, the customer may make the choice to go with a 5G-based RAN or Wi-Fi 6E infrastructure, but at the backend, that is where integration it going to be a lot more exciting.
Q: Tell me more about where Cisco’s customers are when it comes to upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 and beyond.
Mehndiratta: Based on our current transitions, almost all customers that we talk to are looking into deploying Wi-Fi 6 today. They are waiting for 6E to be standardized and for the products to be available. A lot of the AFC mechanisms, like switching from low-power to high-power mode, is yet to be determined depending on the country and related regulations.
Wi-Fi 6E is yet to roll out for all vendors and is more in the trial phase for most. We anticipate that it is going to be a 6 and 6E game for the next 18 to 24 months before Wi-Fi 7 standardizing starts happening. Again, because of backwards capability, the customers that deploy Wi-Fi 6 in the meantime and move onto 7 later will be able to enjoy the same level of architecture benefits on 6E and 7.
Q: What is the impact of offering Wi-Fi as a service? What impact might that have on deployments?
Mehndiratta: Different customers have different viewpoints. Some start at the infrastructure level itself by offering the whole Wi-Fi infrastructure as a service. That’s the first approach.
The second, and where we’re seeing a lot of interest is where a customer has its Wi-Fi network, or the entire infrastructure set up, but instead only certain parts of the network are offered as a service as line of business activities. These services run on the same infrastructure, but the right level of ROI can’t be guaranteed because many of these use cases are ephemeral; they may only be used for the next few years, like remote working use cases. Once everything opens up, the way we work may go back to normal. So, they ask: Should I invest in technology that I may not need in two years?
If you enable as-a-service at any layer, you could deploy the entire infrastructure as a service, or you could deploy the network and only offer a certain part of it as-a-service. But, if you’re network architecture is not modular enough, and you’re tied to everything in a monolithic way, it is very tough to open up that layer and start interacting with a vendor or partner to say hey I can offer this as a service.
So that is what Cisco is working towards: Making sure there is modularity at every layer, so that our customers will get the benefit of saying it’s not just infra-as-a-service, it might be line of business that I can offer a certain customer.
