ITU APT foundation of India workshop April 2025

#wififorall

At the ITU -APT foundation of India workshop I shared my views with the industry leaders on the benefits of using wifi for offloading traffic from the G networks giving consumers a simpler ,faster,cheaper and more efficient way of connecting to the internet.

While I agreed with the participants that it is important to unlock more frequency bands as the demand for data continues to rise, I emphasized that it is also essential for network engineers to recycle & reuse the frequency bands to increase the data transfer rates within the same frequency range.

Cellular networks typically create sectors that cover large areas using high power signals increasing the chances of interference. Wifi on the other hand uses low powered devices that rely on small cells to create dense connectivity zones all working in same frequency range.

And it works. Nearly every home,every office,every shop has wifi. People are happily using it without reporting any disruption due to interference effects. This happens because the same 2.4ghz and 5ghz frequencies are reused and each installation covers only a very small area requiring low power.

Wifi has remained remarkably robust as the data transfer rates have increased, easily accommodating HD streaming,video calling and faster download speeds over the air often exceeding the transfer rates of the G networks.

Wifi systems are not just fast but also energy efficient. With the advancement in application level software consumers now have the option to text and call through apps instead of relying upon traditional calling and texting services provided by G network operators.

Wifi's use of unlicensed spectrum is probably its biggest strength. There are several community projects today that use directional antennas to create long distance wireless links running on 2.4ghz to enable connectivity in rural areas.

Wifi offers one decisive advantage over G networks -- that is its accessibility. It can be set up and tweaked by an untrained person with no prior networking experience. This makes wifi truly a democratic networking solution and it's one of the reasons why everyone likes wifi.

Adding new frequency bands complicates the wireless networking ecosystem that already supports tens of different frequencies. Policy makers must understand that each frequency that is unlocked needs to be supported by hardware : the chip,frequency generators,the transmission lines and the antennas. The ISM bands in mmwave have largely been underutilized for data transfer because it is too difficult to create hardware for them. And that's before counting the attenuation they have to suffer in the atmosphere.

Vested interests of mobile phone manufacturers and base station makers also needs to be taken into account. With every successive new generation of networks it is they who profit the most.

This has been most apparent in the disaster that has been the 5G transition. A few years ago 5G promised the moon. Today however there has not been a single problem that 5g can claim to have addressed that could not have been solved by 4G. And like 4G, 5G speeds have not been upto what we were promised. Today the 5G network is struggling to justify its existence piggybacking on the AI revolution to give meaning to it. Time will tell if it succeeds.

The ever increasing need for data consumption can be satisfied not just by unlocking more frequency bands but also by better utilisation of existing ones. Engineering networks more effectively. Using low power signals, directional antennas and most of all planning networks in a manner that majority of communication takes place over the ISM bands.

What is important today is network penetration. We need to get more users connected on the network as cheaply as possible.

The biggest losers in this game of transitioning to new cellular generation every 5 years are the developing nations. Entire population has to rapidly switch to new handsets. Base stations have to be upgraded. Licenses have to be sold. All this incurs an incredible expense on a nation. It would be wise for countries in Asia and Africa to stop following the standards set by the west and instead create their own. G networks are not the only game in the town. Wifi can match it on any parameter.

Comments

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Notes by Akshat Jiwan Sharma

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