Carrier Wi-Fi Services

In-Home Wi-Fi Deployment Guidelines

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PROGRAM OVERVIEW

PROJECT LEADERS

John Bahr

Stephen Kelly and
Andrew Marchant

Artur Zaks

Jose Pablo Salvador

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Project information

This is a transformational time for in-home Wi-Fi. The demands on home networks have increased over time and customers expectation on the quality and speed of in-home Wi-Fi are growing. Service providers are bringing faster internet speeds to realize the Smart home with the IoT solutions.

Wi-Fi is the most popular way of accessing the internet with a strong penetration on the in-home environment, nevertheless, due to diversity of possibilities and formats of the houses In-Home Wi-Fi suffers challenges related with coverage, performance, interferences, among other issues.

Due to lack of expertise from many end customers, there are challenges in terms of proper configuration, location equipment, home conditions, and security, among others to setup properly the home Wi-Fi network.

Proper deployment and management of In-home Wi-Fi networks can help improve customer experience. This project intents to perform a market assessment of the current In-Home Wi-Fi issues and gaps as well as identify the current industry efforts and future work to solve the identified gaps.

Outcomes / Target Audience

Targeting the main actors in the industry, both operators and vendors, the expected outcomes are:

Delivery of prioritized In-home Wi-Fi carrier requirements
Roadmap of standardization efforts across industry bodies
Symbiotic assessment on residential gateway provider, device provider and chipset vendors collaboration opportunities
Identification and actuation plan on current issues / gaps
Value-add performance testing on areas that can transversally help the industry

Keywords

In-Home, In-home WiFi, Chipset, 802.11ax, Wi-Fi solution, Wi-Fi gateways, Home portal, Internet of things, IoT, Security, QoS, Smart home

Business objectives

Identify In-Home Broadband Carriers requirements towards the improvement of the in-home Wi-Fi customer experience to better delivery a wide range of Smart home capabilities and services
Provide market assessment of the current In-Home Wi-Fi issues and gaps and analyze market landscape with recommendation for future work on the Internet of Things (IoT)

MAIN AREAS COVERED

Architecture options – Multiple options for Home Network architecture, including Multi-AP, Mesh Networks
End-to-end security – aspects and gaps of the home networking environment aiming at protecting operator traffic, e.g. Wi-Fi Community traffic management / untrusted networks potential impacts, and any SSID a telecom would like to push to any specific SSID
Coordination of radio usage or RRM – Best Practices for harmonized/standardized approach that would benefit the whole industry. Eventually, address certification that ensure that CPEs can coordinate with each other (either locally or remotely), would be a great improvement in Wi-Fi the overall residential Wi-Fi footprint. This coordination could go from easy things (such as channel selection) to more complex things (TX power control, on demand channel claim etc.)

Onboarding and managing devices – in the home space, e.g. IoT devices, as well as, identifying was is covered elsewhere and respective gaps
Performance testing – develop use cases related with performance testing to be included in a future certification, under the umbrella of the Carrier Wireless Services Certification, leveraging an opportunity of not being covered by any other certification body
Future evolution – the project will provide guidance on the industry roadmap evolution of In-home architecture and technologies