Eyes on the prize

Two years on from his first appearance in Land Mobile's Big Interview section, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Edgar Figueroa speaks to Sam Fenwick about his organisation’s recent work and the push for spectrum for licence-exempt use in 6GHz

Readers with a good memory may recall that I first interviewed Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance (a not-for-profit global organisation that works to promote advances in Wi-Fi technology and standards) back in our November 2016 issue. At the time, the main topic of conversation was WiGig (which uses wide channels in the 60GHz band to achieve data rates of up to 8Gbps, with low latency at distances of up to 10 metres), as the Wi-Fi Alliance had recently launched its certification programme for the technology. Returning to the present day, Figueroa says the alliance has recently launched the second incarnation of the programme, which “brings some of the features that the market was waiting for”, including seamless session handover.

He adds that “it’s been a slower ramp, just because many of the use-cases and many of the deployment scenarios are still being [determined]. Interestingly, it’s got a foothold in outdoor deployments, outdoor point-to-point, fixed line alternative scenarios, but there’s renewed interest in doing more with that, with opportunities in bringing additional backhaul services.”