Providers are using Wi-Fi 7 to ensure that their customers are getting the gigabit or multi-gigabit service they’re advertising
Wi-Fi 7 is the most reliable version of the technology to date, and as a result, service providers can tap into this technology to better ensure that the gigabit or multi-gigabit service they’re advertising is being provided consistently throughout their subscribers’ homes. And then, on top of that enhanced connectivity, service providers can offer new, premium services.
At the Wi-Fi Forum, David Zhang, the North America Wi-Fi Lead at Nokia explained that today, service providers rely on Wi-Fi routers to terminate broadband connections at the edge of the home and then for mesh technology to propagate that connectivity “corner-to-corner throughout the home.”
He continued: “Something that most operators, and even network equipment vendors, are trying to explore [is] how do we add additional premium services that deliver value to the subscribers, generate new revenues and ensure that end user broadband needs are being met by the network?” He noted that specific services like cybersecurity and parental controls are particularly attractive, while another key category of offerings is around Wi-Fi sensing. “We are looking at putting in these devices Wi-Fi sensing, the ability to detect motion using [radio frequencies] generated by Wi-Fi that turn your routers, your equipment already delivered to your home.” Doing do would enable things like traffic prioritization for users working from home or for those that like to game. The equipment can sense when someone is on a video call or is playing a game and gaming can “automatically route traffic to the shortest hop to minimize latency and deliver a superior… experience,” said Zhang.
In Europe, for instance, French-based telco Orange recently announced the commercial launch of Wi-Fi 7 in its Polish market and sees Wi-Fi 7 as broader opportunity to offer its customers “more than bandwidth,” according to the company’s Senior Vice President of Home Services Innovation Chem Assayag. “Today it’s about… security, stability of the connectivity in the home space, band steering… so it’s bandwidth plus a set of features, which are really important to our customers,” he told Wi-Fi Forum attendees. “Connectivity in the home is the foundation to bring new value-added services and hopefully be able to monetize them.” He, too, said that home security and sensing-based services are emerging as the most popular, and therefore, potentially profitable.
T-Mobile US’ Senior Vice President of Broadband Rob Roy, added that there is also a possibility to offer higher prices for premium subscriber tiers, with gamers of course being the prime example. Wi-Fi 7, he said offers a lot for telcos, from congestion reduction for efficiency and latency improvements. “From the carrier perspective, I think that does a couple of things, which we’re really excited about: One, it just enhances the customer experience… [by providing] faster, more reliable home broadband. That can be a differentiator… [Two,] the new offerings… There are potential premium tiers for gamers, for smart home enthusiasts and those types of things… And then just the ability to think about if you go back to those new service offerings, enabling private networks, different slices … for enterprise… we can start to create a hybrid 5G/Wi-Fi 7 ecosystem.”
Roy also shared that from a vendor perspective, the enhanced connectivity that Wi-Fi 7 provides will also create opportunities around new 5G-integrated routers and new IoT devices, which will make room for new use cases that require the low-latency that only edge computing can offer.
Notably, Jeff Heynen, who is Dell’Oro Group’s Vice President of Broadband Access and Home Networking, said that despite China’s unwillingness to adopt the 6 GHz band for unlicensed Wi-Fi use, the country’s operators are actually driving early adoption of Wi-Fi 7. “And that’s because operators there are deploying low-cost units that do not take advantage of the 6 GHz band,” he explained. “However, it is very critical to these operators to be able to market Wi-Fi 7, even if the full capabilities of Wi-fi 7 — as defined in the specifications — aren’t available.”
China Unicom and China Telecom, for example, have both been rapidly switching over to Wi-Fi 7 units with 2×2 MIMO capabilities since last spring.
He added that efforts around improving Fiber to the Room (FTTR) are driving material volumes of W-Fi 7 units in the Chinese market. FTTR extends a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) optical fiber access network to individual rooms within a home or office. As of December 2024, it has been reported that China has 30 million FTTR subscribers. Because Wi-Fi 7 can significantly improve in-home mesh connections between Wi-Fi access points by combining different types of unlicensed spectrum together with multilink operation, users can get faster speeds and lower latency — in every room of their home or office building.
As telcos around the world consider how the latest (and future) generations of Wi-Fi fit into their service offerings, many are receiving support from equipment and software vendors like Nokia, which Jason Welz, the chief revenue officer at Gryphon Connect — a SAAS Platform delivering CyberSecurity and Parental Control applications — said is helping providers stay relevant in a drastically changing landscape by operating at the optical level, the IP core level, the access level and now at the application OSS/BSS level. “They do so by helping service providers understand what is going on in the network from a customer experience and customer service perspective, as well as building out what is essentially an app store,” he said. “This approach addresses a service provider’s bottom line from two directions: first, it reduces their operating costs transactionally but it also drives new revenue opportunities.”
