Major industry body publishes new Wi-Fi guidelines

Speaking of the document, Tiago Rodrigues, general manager of the WBA, said: “The Wi-Fi experience has always been dictated by conditions that are specific to each home, which creates a chaotic puzzle for operators. To compound this, the advent of the ‘smart home’ and the explosion of streaming and IoT services is dramatically increasing demands on in-home Wi-Fi networks.”

Rodrigues continued: “Current standards have come a long way to tackle the issues of interference, congestion, coverage and performance. But with increasingly variable network conditions on the horizon, innovation in smart Wi-Fi network optimisation will be crucial to guarantee quality of service for customers.

“The WBA is calling for vendors to join forces with the operator community to comply with its proposed common guidelines. Included within these are recommendations to address the in-home challenges of coordination of radio resource management, device onboarding and management, as well as deployment and end-to-end security.”

According to figures quoted by the WBA, there is expected to be around 1.3 billion devices connected to people’s homes by 2022. This has already prompted many operators to move towards a multiple Wi-Fi access point (Multi-AP) strategy to tackle home coverage issues and address congestion.