- Consumers increasingly expect seamless connectivity between indoor and outdoor environments
- Organizations like the Wireless Broadband Alliance are pushing for greater interoperability between Wi-Fi and private cellular
- A new phase of industry standards development begins in 2025
Cellular and Wi-Fi’s love/hate relationship is one for the ages. Some may recall when Verizon aggressively dissed Wi-Fi. Others remember Wi-Fi’s role in saving face for AT&T when its early exclusive on the iPhone threatened to bring down its network. Debates over the licensed spectrum that cellular loves versus the unlicensed spectrum that Wi-Fi relies upon play on and on and on.
Spectrum fights aside, though, the cellular and Wi-Fi camps are making greater efforts to show a unified front, particularly when it comes to private network deployments. The benefits for end users – that is, the enterprises eyeing private networks, many of which already have Wi-Fi networks – are clear. Deploy devices that take advantage of both technologies on the same campus, including handoffs? That sounds divine.
However, while signs point to greater convergence, just how far and fast that happens is another question.
It’s not that easy
Claus Hetting, CEO and chairman of Wi-Fi Now, doesn’t see full convergence playing out in the foreseeable future, including seamless handovers between private 5G and Wi-Fi, largely due to the complexity and limited market incentive. He points to the “whole 3GPP machinery” that oversees cellular standards and the more nimble, in his view, structure of the IEEE, which manages Wi-Fi specifications.
“Those two processes would have to work together in order to come up with something, which in its nature, is not easy to do,” he told Fierce.
“It’s not that it’s a hard technology. It’s just a lot of changes would be needed to support this.”
One of the problems is the dominance of Wi-Fi in enterprises and by comparison, the small role of private 5G networks. If private cellular and Wi-Fi convergence is to happen in a more meaningful way, it would probably support less than 5% of the enterprise Wi-Fi market. That’s how small the private networking space is at this juncture.
“I just don’t think it’s going to fly, even though I’m sure they have great ideas and the technologies can be worked out. It’s just the incentive to do it is very, very small,” Hetting said.
WBA leads the way
But the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) sees enough incentive to press forward. The organization – whose members include AT&T, Boingo Wireless, Boldyn Network, BT Group, Cisco, Comcast and Nokia – points out that vendors with private cellular solutions are often leaders in the Wi-Fi space, advocating for a blended approach that leverages the strengths of both. That’s a positive sign toward convergence, according to WBA.
In 2025, the organization will kick off its next phase of private 5G and Wi-Fi convergence, focusing on technical considerations. That includes developing new industry standards addressing radio access technology (RAT) roaming, traffic steering and quality of experience (QoE) metrics. The goal is for enterprises to benefit from both 5G’s speed and reliability and Wi-Fi’s coverage and flexibility.
Some of this boils down to having the same “identity” connecting to Wi-Fi and the private cellular network. That’s where OpenRoaming comes in. OpenRoaming is the Wi-Fi industry’s way of making roaming on Wi-Fi as seamless as it is in the cellular world, eliminating the need to type onerous passwords every time you want to get onto a secure Wi-Fi network.
“That’s where we are doing some work,” said WBA CEO Tiago Rodriguez. “We want to expand OpenRoaming to private cellular in such a way that the IT managers can have that flexibility.”
The WBA is already working with the 3GPP to make this happen. “I think it can be one more tool in the toolbox of a private cellular network. It can give them a lot of flexibility,” he told Fierce.
Making it happen
While advocacy and standards groups like WBA do their thing, Hetting asked a valid question: Is there enough demand for greater convergence and an actual need to support handoffs between Wi-Fi and private 5G networks?
“The short answer is increasingly YES as end-users expect seamless connectivity transition between indoor and outdoor environments,” said Adlane Fellah, chief analyst at Maravedis and lead author of the WBA’s 2025 Industry Report.
This can be achieved in several ways, he said. One is handoff management, which is addressed in 3GPP Release 16. Another is through dual connectivity, where 5G acts as a backbone for high-reliability scenarios and Wi-Fi provides cost-efficient, localized coverage.
“The handset must include radios supporting both Wi-Fi (typically 6E or Wi-Fi 7 for high-speed connectivity) and private or public 5G (supporting licensed or unlicensed spectrum like CBRS),” he told Fierce. “Optimized antennas are required to handle simultaneous communication across multiple bands without interference.”
In an encouraging sign, a new generation of ARM-powered laptops is renewing interest in adding cellular connectivity into Wi-Fi-centric devices, he said. However, the bigger opportunity remains in the commercial sector, where other protocols such as ultra-wideband (UWB) and Wi-Fi HaLow provide a lot of opportunity for IoT-adjacent use cases, he noted.
And convergence certainly isn't a new concept for vendors. The likes of Cisco and HPE with its Aruba line support increased cooperation between private 5G and Wi-Fi.
“The concept of a unified private cellular and enterprise Wi-Fi network has been looked at by different industry players,” said Siân Morgan, research director at Dell’Oro Group. “HPE acquired Athonet, which would make a good basis for the development of a unified WLAN and private cellular offer.”
Elsewhere, CommScope has pitched multi access networks to address networks based on private cellular or Wi-Fi using its Ruckus One management platform, she noted. “There is also an interesting start-up called Ramen that delivers a combination of private cellular and WLAN in an as-a-Service offer.”
Of course, getting mobile network operators (MNOs) behind any such efforts is key. Service providers generally see a chance to provide feature parity between 5G standalone networks and Wi-Fi 6/7, although most are publicly mute on the topic, Fellah said.
AT&T, Boingo and BT are active members of the WBA and convergence advocates, but most Tier 1 MNOs are still grappling with the private networking opportunity, where Wi-Fi and 5G deployed using unlicensed spectrum has largely shut the public networks out, he noted.
“Large enterprises, the best customers for the MNO, generally like to maintain control of their own networks, and so private networks, heavily complemented by Wi-Fi, remain dominant here,” Fellah concluded.