Wi-Fi 6: Driving Digital Transformation for a Smarter Tomorrow

It is hard to imagine that Wi-Fi was only made mainstream less than 20 years ago when it crawled at 54Mbps, and with just a handful of consumer devices supporting the technology. Fast forward to today: Wi-Fi is as ubiquitous as it is essential, with demand for connected devices expected to reach 55.7 billion by 2025. At work, it keeps us productive and collaborative. At home, it keeps us informed and entertained.

Digital transformation is well under way for many organizations across Asia, with 65% of APAC GDP (excluding Japan) expected to be digitalized, reaching US$1.2 trillion in spending by 2022. At the heart of successful digitalization initiatives is the enterprise network powered by Wi-Fi 6. Deployed across different industries globally, Wi-Fi 6 delivers high throughput, low latency, and high capacity to support new applications and use cases, from AR and VR to real-time IT automation, as well as key digitalization technologies such as cloud computing, campus mobility, and IoT deployment.

Ultimately, these will push the boundaries of productivity, efficiency, and collaboration while delivering enhanced end-user and application experiences.

Enabling Intelligence that Connects People, Things, and Environment

What sets Wi-Fi 6 apart from Wi-Fi 5 is not just its blazing speeds of up to 9.6Gbps, but also its ability to accommodate four times more capacity for devices and larger bandwidth, making it ideal for use in crowded spaces and bandwidth-intensive applications. Think of a room filled with people streaming 8K movies without any buffering.

Simply put, Wi-Fi 6 provides the foundation for greater, smarter things to come. Some use cases organizations can look forward to with a Wi-Fi 6-powered enterprise network include:

• Deeper collaboration for better outcomes: As enterprises go global and hybrid work becomes the norm, employees can facilitate deeper collaboration with more collaborative HD video and multi-screen interactions at people-centric, comfortable workspaces instead of traditional text and voice communications at fixed cubicles and meeting rooms.
• Immersive education for the next generation: Equipping students with 21^st Century Skills means shifting away from rote learning and traditional textbooks to an immersive interactive learning enabled by technologies such as digital realities, devices, and insights to foster critical thinking, digital literacy, creativity, and autonomy.
• Wireless production for safer plants: Repetitive, menial, and high-risk jobs that were once manual human labor will be replaced by intelligent robots that drive factories toward automated production, empowering workers to partake in more constructive and meaningful work while reducing workplace accidents.
• Data-driven services for happier citizens: Public services that were once associated with bureaucracy and inefficiency will be replaced instead with satisfaction and a higher quality of living as government agencies take on a data-driven approach to delivering efficient remote services such as telehealth and e-services.

With digitalization extending its presence from workplaces into production spaces and operations, organizations looking to thrive in the cloud era need an enterprise network that enables data-driven intelligence and effectively supports new technologies such as automation and AI at scale.

Laying the foundations of a future-proof enterprise network

How do organizations ensure they have the robust foundation in place? We recommend IT leaders to have these key considerations in mind when laying down their enterprise network strategy.

Flexibility and ease of managing the architecture

A network architecture with a unified management system to centrally manage the many components of an enterprise network, from LAN to user authentication policies, significantly reduces management complexity and alleviate IT pressures. At the same time, one that features flexible deployment models, whether it is on-premises or on the cloud, is ideal in meeting specific requirements in various scenarios.

Network management

Having full lifecycle automated network services, from planning to optimization and across WLANs, LANs, WANs, goes a long way to simplifying operations. This will empower organizations to speed up IT operation time through streamlined and shorter processes, as well as enable savings in resources and investment which could be used for more revenue-generating initiatives.

Intelligent O&M

An ideal enterprise network comes with experience evaluation and optimization for experience assurance. Organizations especially looking to deliver seamless end-user experience can benefit greatly from intelligent operations and management to proactively analyze and detect potential issues, locate exceptions, and optimize wireless network performance. This in turn will enable efficient production and campus services.

Robust network security

Data security has been on the headlines in recent years, and organizations would do well to ensure that their enterprise network offers the security both they and end-users need to maximize the benefits of the cloud era. Having basic network security may no longer be enough; it is also key to proactively identify and rectify threats, either through data-driven security protection or encrypted communication analytics.

Network openness

It is critical for a network to be interoperable with third-party apps, systems, protocols, and endpoints—especially given that an average small organization deploys 73 apps and larger ones deploy 175 apps within their business. This will ensure that operations run smoothly and are able to tap on the promise of greater efficiency and productivity of digital transformation.

Innovations such as Huawei CloudCampus 3.0 are cropping up to address these considerations and power the network of the future. Coupled with the right enterprise network strategy, Wi-Fi 6 can provide you the speed, bandwidth, and seamlessness you need to deliver whatever campus network your enterprise needs—whether it is redefining the office experience, building a smart bank, or enabling flexible manufacturing.

Where will Wi-Fi 6 take us tomorrow? Well, before the next big thing in Wi-Fi rolls in, we can expect it to continue being the cornerstone for organizations to succeed in a hypermobile, hyperconnected cloud era.