- Out of the 880m subscribers in India, only 70m or less than 10% are fixed-line subscribers.
- Deployment of Wi-Fi 6 and 6GHz spectrum will be a credible alternative, Facebook says
Bengaluru: Enterprise Wi-Fi players have been urged to come up with open standards, in an effort to innovate and allow the implementation of more affordable solutions to enhance usability, scalability and security.
As more countries queue up to build-up their infrastructure, preparing themselves for the 5G era, there is an intense debate about how Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), could bring in equally capable speeds, creating a much-needed fillip within the existing 4G infrastructure.
According to Dan Rabinovitsj, Vice-President of Facebook, the deployment of Wi-Fi 6 and 6GHz spectrum will be a credible alternative. Wi-Fi 6 offers much faster (almost closer to 5G) speeds and at much lower latency.
“We are actively working together with our team in spectrum policy to promote 6GHz all around the world. We just think this is an increasingly important tool in the toolbox to enhance connectivity in general. The faster we can move to deploy 6GHz, the better. We need to embrace it like our lives depend on it. This is a revolution,” he says.
5G expensive for some countries
“There are many markets in the world that are not thinking of 5G now. 5G is a really interesting evolution. There are some novel and interesting things that will come out of 5G. But the reality is there are many developing nations that simply won’t be able to afford to move to 5G any time soon,” says Rabinovitsj.
According to him, developing countries should roll out 6GHs even as they work towards building their 5G network. The majority of the developing countries are still rolling out 4G networks and are still in the process of testing 5G. In the majority of cases, even the 4G network is not fully deployed and network penetration has only managed to achieve 2G and 3G speeds in rural zones.
However, dependence on closed proprietary type of environment, especially by enterprise-class players, has made it difficult for the industry to come up with universal architecture, thereby preventing the widespread adoption of the latest technology innovations, says Rabinovitsj.
“There is really no standardisation. The proprietary drivers and systems actually slow things down in terms of being able to roll out networks with scale and at more affordable prices. There is a lot of technology and it is extremely difficult to come up with universal architecture,” says Rabinovitsj, speaking during a webinar organised by Wifi Now.
Digital divide
Urging players to start rethinking about what can be done to innovate more quickly, he says, “The next few years we will see significantly more work being done in the open-source community, they will start bringing enterprise-class Wi-Fi and enterprise-class switching,” he adds.
Explaining the problem further, he emphasised on the great disparity between the developed and developing world. The global average internet speed of the Wi-Fi network is 19Mbps, while the developed world is racing to reach 1Gbps.
“In the United States, 75 per cent of all internet traffic is on Wi-Fi, but it is only 42 per cent in the developing world. In 63 per cent of the countries, the internet is faster on LTE. In all of India where there are 800 million subscribers, there are only 70 million fixed-line subscribers,” he says, while stressing on making Wi-Fi affordable, easy to deploy, and available to everyone 24/7.
The key challenge, he says is about creating a sustainable high-performance public Wi-Fi network.
“The cellular industry is struggling. Even in a place like Japan, where fibre is much more penetrated and you can almost get it every 50 metres, it is still not available in every single place. The same is true for Wi-Fi. That is why we are working on alternatives to high-performance backhauls that can reduce the cost for everyone running those networks,” he said.
Emphasising Facebook’s initiatives, he says that connectivity is at the heart of their mission and they are working on developing the core technology, developing analytics tools and insights into how networks perform and also to create innovative business models to drive down the cost of internet access around the world.
“One of the reasons why we invested so heavily in 60GHz is because we fundamentally believe that if we do not have the ability to bring fibre into the network, the next best thing is millimetre wave wireless fibre,” he says adding that Wi-Fi is still the best tool to democratise internet access globally.