2021 promises to be a significant year in the world of Wi-Fi, according to this years’ WBA Annual Industry Report. With COVID-19 and global lockdowns, 2020 has been a challenging year which has reinforced the important role that Wi-Fi has to play in keeping the world connected. During lockdown, traffic patterns inevitably shifted from an office setting to a home setting, with many cellular and broadband providers seeing massive, sustained increases in traffic across residential areas. The stability of Wi-Fi has arguably been the unsung hero of this situation – it has kept a lot of things moving and working at a time when failure would have resulted in a much bleaker situation for people and business.
As 2021 unfolds Wi-Fi will be important to businesses and consumers in many different ways, and the richness and diversity of services it enables are growing in line with new spectrum, standards and business models.
With Wi-Fi 6 going mainstream in 2021 and Wi-Fi 6E developments closely following, these final results highlight how the Wi-Fi platform is constantly evolving and so enabling additional services and business cases. Despite the challenges of 2020, the clear roadmap to next generation standards – with enriched spectrum, OpenRoaming and convergence with 5G – is clearly instilling high levels of confidence in Wi-Fi to support a very wide range of applications and revenue streams in the coming year.
As well as reviewing the year, the report addresses emerging trends and business models in key vertical markets such as Retail, Aviation, Hospitality, Smart transportation, IoT, healthcare and general industry. In addition, it charts the progress of technology trends and developments including standards evolution, OpenRoaming, Mesh Wi-Fi, and Mobile edge Computing. All these topics and more are covered in this year’s Report. We hope it provides a valuable guide to the varied and influential work the WBA carries out in the world of Wi-Fi and unlicensed spectrum technology; and inspires you to take part in the rich and business-critical agenda that lies ahead in 2021.
