Abstract
In recent years, significant attention has been directed toward the fifth generation of wireless broadband connectivity known as ‘5G’, currently being deployed by Mobile Network Operators. Surprisingly, there has been considerably less attention paid to ‘Wi-Fi 6’, the new IEEE 802.1ax standard in the family of Wireless Local Area Network technologies with features targeting private, edge-networks. This paper revisits the suitability of cellular and Wi-Fi in delivering high-speed wireless Internet connectivity. Both technologies aspire to deliver significantly enhanced performance, enabling each to deliver much faster wireless broadband connectivity, and provide further support for the Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine communications, positioning the two technologies as technical substitutes in many usage scenarios. We conclude that both are likely to play important roles in the future, and simultaneously serve as competitors and complements. We anticipate that 5G will remain the preferred technology for wide-area coverage, while Wi-Fi 6 will remain the preferred technology for indoor use, thanks to its much lower deployment costs. However, the traditional boundaries that differentiated earlier generations of cellular and Wi-Fi are blurring. Proponents of one technology may argue for the benefits of their chosen technology displacing the other, requesting regulatory policies that would serve to tilt the marketplace in their favour. We believe such efforts need to be resisted, and that both technologies have important roles to play in the marketplace, based on the needs of heterogeneous use cases. Both technologies should contribute to achieving the goal of providing affordable, reliable, and ubiquitously available high-capacity wireless broadband connectivity.
Highlights
Almost in synchrony we are seeing the roll-out of the generation of wireless technologies for both cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity
Given that we are in the early stages of the transition to the generation of cellular and Wireless Local Access Network (WLAN) technologies, with the potential to anticipate the significant wireless connectivity changes that might occur, the research question we explore in this paper is as follows: To what extent will 5G and Wi-Fi 6 be predominantly complementary, or will technological substitution lead to a new trajectory for wireless connectivity, with one gaining increased prominence over the other?
Global data flows have been rapidly growing for decades, with the majority consisting of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic carried over the open Internet and/or private IP networks (Claffy et al, 2020; Knieps and Stocker, 2019)
Summary
Almost in synchrony we are seeing the roll-out of the generation of wireless technologies for both cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity. 3G and an earlier Wi-Fi 801.11 standard were seen as competing wireless technologies (Lehr and McKnight, 2003) This was before Apple's iPhone propelled mass-market mobile broadband via smartphone devices toward becoming a must-have platform for ubiquitous Internet connectivity (West and Mace, 2010). Cellular has historically focused on the mass-market and has played less of a role in providing wireless connectivity for businesses, except where the two worlds overlap.2 This is changing since many anticipate that some of the most interesting and important applications for 5G will be in vertical industrial sectors and other private-network applications (which are often indoors or deployed in campus environments and are less dependent on the licensed spectrum that cellular operators have principally relied on in the past).
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