Wi-Fi has become king in the enterprise world. Regardless of the size of a business, the number of sites it operates, or the market it serves, businesses are relying on Wi-Fi as a foundation for the array of technologies they are using in their digital transformation. They are also realizing that Wi-Fi is a critical platform to engage with customers and empower employees.
There are those who claim that with the emergence of 5G, Wi-Fi’s days are numbered. We strongly disagree and make the case that Wi-Fi will continue to dominate the indoor technology environment and leverage its formidable footprint and ecosystem. We believe it is use cases that dictate technology use, not the other way around. One of the main contributing factors to growing traffic is consumer video use. And the main solution to meet the requirements of the increasing demand for bandwidth has long been by leveraging Wi-Fi networks, which enables operators to scale capacity to meet their subscribers’ needs.
Globally, the February 2019 Cisco VNI Index shows that overall mobile data traffic, which was of 12 exabytes per month in 2016, is expected to grow to 77 exabytes per month by 2022, a seven-fold increase over this period. In parallel, the global number of mobile devices was 7.9 billion in 2016 and is forecast to reach 12.3 billion by 2022. Given these numbers and forecasts and knowing that the percentage of wireless traffic running on Wi-Fi is between 60% and 80%, depending on the operator and the region, one can understand not only the current footprint Wi-Fi has, but the fundamentals of growth for this global technology.
Wi-Fi is also not resting on its laurels, as showcased by the introduction of the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard which promises to deliver greater spectrum efficiency and is optimized to serve high density environments and IoT. Wi-Fi is evolving quickly and will be an integral part of the 5G vision.
In this paper, we make the case that Wi-Fi offers businesses a wealth of possibilities to become more productive and efficient, while empowering their employees and engaging more deeply with their clients and stakeholders. We discuss the trends in guest and private Wi-Fi and the variety of marketing tactics that can be used to better engage with visitors and customers towards greater monetization.
Initiatives enabled by guest and private Wi-Fi include complimentary tasks such as real-time marketing offers, managing inventory and optimizing pricing. In this paper, we dive into specific verticals that have embraced the use of Wi-Fi to engage with their stakeholders, including retail and restaurants, financial institutions, and healthcare entities.
We also demonstrate that not only is Wi-Fi at the core of each enterprise today, but that it makes sense for these businesses to outsource the management of their Wi-Fi infrastructure to a trusted Managed Service Provider (MSP) to focus their talent and energy on their core business. In doing so, enterprises —especially those that are highly distributed throughout multiple locations—can benefit from large economies of scale, less downtime, and more peace of mind from relying on a partner that will deal with all the headaches involved in managing, maintaining, and updating increasingly complex Wi-Fi networks.
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