WiFi 6 and 6E create bold new opportunities for businesses and consumers. Learn what new capabilities this tech holds, the new management techniques needed to harness it, and what’s coming next in this video interview.
Alejandro Pinero:
All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to yet another video interview here at Fierce. My name is Alejandro Pinero, and it's a pleasure to be joined by Bill McFarland, [Former] Plume CTO [2015-2022]. Bill, thanks for joining us.
Bill McFarland:
Thank you, Alejandro. Great to be with Fierce.
Alejandro Pinero:
Well Bill, before we get into the discussion for today, if you don't mind giving us a brief introduction about your role over at Plume and a little bit about the company as well.
Bill McFarland:
So I'm the [Former] CTO at Plume [2015-2022]. I lead projects in optimization and machine learning, and I also do a lot in the way of our patent portfolio and I do participate in industry standards as well. Now I think today we're going to focus on one of the services that we provide, which is WiFi management. But the same platform we also provide solutions for cyber-security, looking for viruses and malware, parental controls, controlling screen time, and limiting the content kids can see on the internet and so forth. We even have a WiFi motion-based system that can be used to form a security system, kind of a home alarm system, or it can be used for wellness monitoring. So this is a flexible platform that allows service providers to provide additional new services to their customers, potentially increasing their revenue or their customer loyalty.
Alejandro Pinero:
Brilliant. So as you mentioned, we are going to be talking about WiFi specifically. So we've already seen some early deployments in WiFi 6 and 6E, and certainly a lot of interest in this next generation of WiFi connectivity. So what are your thoughts on what role it'll play in resolving some of those connectivity issues we've seen in the past in smart homes?
Bill McFarland:
Yeah, so let's start with WiFi 6. It brings a number of new features that improve the situation for people's WiFi in their home. So the first thing is that it enables these 160 MHz wide channels. These devices have the ability to operate with about twice as wide a channel bandwidth as previous generation devices. And that allows them to operate at a higher data rate and to be more robust, particularly when carrying real time services like video.
At the other end of the scale, WiFi 6 adds OFDMA. So say you have a lot of WiFi light bulbs in your home. WiFi actually has historically been very inefficient at communicating with that type of situation because it sends a separate little packet to each of those light bulbs. And that consumes a lot of air time and system capacity. With OFDMA, all of those transmissions are bundled together into a single packet transmission, which becomes very efficient.
There are other new features in WiFi 6 that are helpful as well. There's a thing called BSS color. It's a way to coordinate the interference that might be going on between different apartments, say, in an apartment complex, allowing a better overall system capacity and less interference to affect the different networks in that apartment complex. There's also the ability to reserve bandwidths or sometimes it's called resource unit reservation. If you have a really important task that's going on, for example, this video teleconference call, you can actually allocate reserved bandwidth for that, so that it's not affected by other things that might be going on in your home at the same time.
WiFi 6E is the addition of 6 GHz spectrum to WiFi 6, and that brings a tremendous amount of additional spectrum, creating more of these wide channel bandwidths. And because it's new and kind of uncongested right now, that spectrum will be cleaner and have less interference in it.
Alejandro Pinero:
So that was exactly my next question, around that additional spectrum that WiFi 6E brings on the 6 GHz band. How critical, or what role will it play in resolving some of those bandwidth demands and the high quality expected that you were alluding to in the previous answer?
Bill McFarland:
So, it roughly doubles the amount of spectrum that's available for WiFi. In the beginning, there won't be that many devices in that frequency band, this new band. And so it'll be less congested, there'll be less interference and so forth. So it brings this double benefit. And this kind of added capacity is becoming more and more important. What Plume sees is the top 10% of their homes have about 41 or more WiFi devices in them. And the top 20% of our homes have 32 or more WiFi devices in them. When you think about a home that maybe has all of its light bulbs are WiFi-enabled light bulbs, for example, you can easily imagine homes where the number of WiFi devices in the home will exceed 100.
This new spectrum, these new wide channels that it supports, enable very high speeds. It enables very robust communication without interference, and it enables a total capacity to serve much better these large number of devices. So in homes where you have either a large number of devices, or you have a number of these real time, video type streams going on at once, this is going to make a big improvement for consumers.
Alejandro Pinero:
That's great. So steering the discussion now towards management. Now there might be an assumption out there, or at least CSPs (Communications Sevice Providers) might come to the logical conclusion that WiFi 6 and 6E will inevitably need less management. So I guess this is the time to give that answer. Is this right, or do we have a misconception here?
Bill McFarland:
It is a misconception. There's three reasons, really, that WiFi 6 and 6E produce new and greater WiFi management requirements than did the previous generations WiFi 4 or WiFi 5. The first is that WiFi 6 and 6E have new features that simply need new management and configuration. I already mentioned some of them. You have to carefully manipulate the client devices, such that you can get a group of these OFDMA-capable client devices on the same access point. If they're all spread out among a whole bunch of different access points, that feature can't really do any good. So you need to apply intelligence there.
Operating in the 6 GHz band, that might need this thing that's called AFC, automatic frequency control. That's also a cloud-based management thing that looks for potential interference. We have point to point microwave links that are also in that same frequency band. That's another capability that needs to be managed. This BSS color management. Here, you're coordinating the behavior of WiFi networks across something like an entire apartment complex, not just within each apartment individually, but looking at the entire apartment complex as a system, as a whole and optimizing that entire apartment complex.
So, those are some new features that require this new management. The other thing is that WiFi 6 and 6E simply complicate some of the management that already was needing to be done. So WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 systems can benefit from a good centralized management system as well. But these complicate it. There's 160 mega channels. Before you could choose between 80, 40, and 20 MHz. Now we have 160 MHz to choose from as well, and very few of those channels. So you have to make very intelligent choices about that. You also have 6 GHz usage to consider, and there are complicated security issues because the 6 GHz band supports only the newest version of the WiFi security standards, WPA 3.
So you have to be very intelligent about the way you manipulate clients to move them between the 6 GHz band and the 5 GHz band and so forth. Finally, WiFi 6 and 6E bring a bunch of new features that are more TDMA like. This is like the cellular system where we have very much reserved times that can really make the quality of service that's provided better. They have these new features and capabilities that are more sensitive to interference. They run really well when there isn't interference, but they're actually more sensitive to interference. So for all these different reasons, these new technologies require really more WiFi management rather than less.
Alejandro Pinero:
So with all this in mind, what are some of the key elements in terms of management that service providers need to extract the maximum benefit of WiFi 7, for example, for their customers?
Bill McFarland:
Yeah, the first thing you need is really flexible, optimized what we call topologies. Topology meaning just the way that the network is connected together. So we're having more and more homes that have multiple access points in them. You have to decide which access point connects to which other access point, the frequency channels that are in use everywhere. People have proposed very simple minded approaches to making use of WiFi 6E. Let's just put all the backhaul connections on the 6 GHz band, and it'll end up on the same frequency channel and all the client connections can be in the 5 GHz band. It's simple, it's easy to configure a network like that, but it doesn't work very well. You end up with self-interference as you go through multiple hops on the backhaul connections, each hop interfering with the other hops that are going on in the home.
You also end up with your client devices, even ones that are the brand new WiFi 6E kinds of client devices, not using the 6 GHz band at all. So you really want a more flexible arrangement where you have different frequencies in use in the backhaul connections, where client devices can connect on either the 5 GHz or the 6 GHz band so that they can make use of the new capabilities that they have.
You have other centralized management capabilities as well. You have coordination across networks, all the different networks in an apartment. I talked about that. So all of these things are the key elements you need centralized management, management that goes across multiple homes or apartments, and management that allows for these very flexible, kind of arbitrarily configured network configurations in people's homes.
Alejandro Pinero:
Well, let's wrap up with what's next. So what are you guys seeing as coming up in WiFi? We've mentioned WiFi 7, but perhaps also, how will future standards set the path for cloud-based management, for example. What do you think we can look forward to next in terms of wifi development?
Bill McFarland:
Well, certainly the big news is WiFi 7 and it seems to be coming pretty quickly. It'll be a while before it's actually out there and the products are available, but people are already planning and talking about it now. And one of the things that is beneficial is to put in place a centralized management system like this, in order to be ready for that when it arrives.
Now, WiFi 7 is going to bring a couple new features, one of which is called multilink operation. This is where WiFi devices actually connect on multiple frequency channels at once, typically in different frequency bands. They might have a connection on some frequency channel in the 6 GHz band, in parallel with a connection on a channel in the 5 GHz band. These two connections can be used in parallel to increase the total throughput or capacity between these two devices.
But even more importantly, it can be used kind of as an immediate automatic failover mechanism. If there's interference or some kind of congestion on one of these channels, it can immediately move packets on the other. So it's going to really greatly improve latency and jitter. Another new feature in WiFi 7 is called puncturing, and that's the ability to connect while leaving a gap or a whole transmission, and that can be done when you have radar systems in a frequency band you have to avoid, or these microwave point to point systems in the 6 GHz band that you might need to avoid.
So it's going to allow us to make better use of the spectrum that's there, use higher transmit powers, and still avoid these other systems that WiFi systems are supposed to get out of the way of and avoid. A third major feature in WiFi 7 is 320 MHz bandwidth channels, yet another doubling of the bandwidth. And again, that improves the speed and the robustness of these connections, but it brings us back into this situation where suddenly we don't have too many independent frequency channels to use. So again, it brings back the importance of this centralized planning about who's going to use which frequency channels.
Alejandro Pinero:
Well, Bill, I look forward to speaking to you again, as we move through these complexities and these coming developments in WiFi, but for now, thank you so much for joining us here at Fierce. And we hope to speak to you soon again.
Bill McFarland: