Hu Xiangdong, chief analyst of IDC
Geek Network Geek Observation April 26 As the basic unit of the city, the park is the main place for human production and life, and it is also an important carrier for the development of the digital economy. In recent years, as all walks of life have deepened their digital transformation and accelerated their march towards the intelligent era, the development of smart parks has entered a deep water area. As the "new infrastructure" for the long-term development of smart campuses, campus networks have evolved towards high-quality 10 Gigabit campuses, accelerating the embrace of new generations of technologies such as Wi-Fi 7.
On April 18, during the Huawei Global Analyst Conference, Hu Xiangdong, Chief Analyst of IDC, was interviewed by Geek.com and other industry media, talking about the application status and market prospects of Wi-Fi 7, analyzing the technical upgrades and key breakthroughs of Wi-Fi 7, and looking forward to the application scenarios of Wi-Fi 7 in the campus field.
Wi-Fi 7 shipments in the Chinese market will exceed 20% in 2024, with a three-year compound growth rate of 50%
According to Hu Xiangdong, with the rapid advancement of digital intelligence in all walks of life, more and more enterprises in the Chinese market regard digital intelligence as the primary development goal, and some industries and scenarios in the campus network are upgrading to 10 Gigabit, which coincides with the maturity of Wi-Fi 7 in terms of standards, devices, and terminal products, and has accumulated some experience in early deployment and application, so 2024 will be the first year of Wi-Fi 7 development in China.
In terms of shipments, IDC predicts that the shipment of Wi-Fi 7 APs in the Chinese market will exceed 20% in 2024, and the compound growth rate will reach 50% in the next three years, showing a trend of rapid growth. At the same time, compared with overseas markets such as Europe and the United States, China will develop more rapidly because it has not experienced the transition of Wi-Fi 6E and has directly upgraded from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7.
According to IDC's 2023-2027 Global Wi-Fi Technology Forecast, the global market will reach 233 million Wi-Fi 7 terminals in 2024 and 2.1 billion in 2027, and the number of Wi-Fi 7 AP shipments will also increase rapidly, reaching 12 million units by 2027. This means that the Chinese market, which is the first to set sail, will occupy a significant share of it.
In 2023, some industry customers in the Chinese market will take the lead in upgrading Wi-Fi 7 and will enter the stage of large-scale deployment in 2024. For example, Huawei has released a full range of Wi-Fi 7 products globally, which have been successfully deployed by hundreds of enterprises in industries such as education, manufacturing, and healthcare, realizing the value of the new generation of Wi-Fi 7 technology in helping enterprises upgrade to digital intelligence.
Compared with Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 has achieved all-round upgrades, and encryption technology makes up for the security shortcomings
Historically, Wi-Fi technology has been updated every 4-5 years. However, from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 7, with the rapid increase in network requirements for digital intelligence in enterprises, the intergenerational evolution is more rapid, and the corresponding technology upgrades are also more significant. During the interview, Hu Xiangdong introduced the upgrade value of Wi-Fi 7 in terms of bandwidth, latency, concurrent access, roaming, reliability, and security.
Compared with Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 7 achieves a 2.4-fold increase in bandwidth, with a theoretical peak speed of about 30 Gbps, which can better support high-storage applications, including AR/VR, 4K/8K, cloud gaming, medical imaging, and video quality inspection and production process monitoring in the manufacturing field.
In terms of latency, Wi-Fi 7 uses the Multi-Link technology and the Multi-RU mechanism to flexibly allocate resources in different frequency bands, improve channel resource utilization, and reduce latency to 10 milliseconds, better supporting latency-sensitive applications in enterprise manufacturing.
In terms of concurrent access, multi-device concurrency in the campus requires APs to support more terminal access, and Wi-Fi 7's enhanced bandwidth and better resource adjustment capabilities can help enterprises connect a large number of mobile terminals to better meet the high-density application scenarios in the campus.
In terms of roaming and reliability, Wi-Fi 7 can guide users to seamlessly connect to APs with closer proximity and better network performance, providing more stable network assurance for mobile office in enterprise campuses, mobile ward rounds in hospitals, and AGV trolley operation in logistics and warehousing bases.
In addition, with the deepening of digital intelligence, Wi-Fi 7 follows the WPA3 encryption standard of Wi-Fi 6 to achieve more advanced security protection than WPA2. At the same time, in view of the chronic problem that wireless broadcast communications are easy to be monitored, some manufacturers in the industry have solved malicious monitoring through physical scrambling at the root, and through the innovation of wireless access frameworks, Wi-Fi 7 can be used with confidence in scenarios with high requirements for data confidentiality.
At this point, according to Geek.com, Huawei has developed a secret shield function based on air interface channel encryption technology, which innovatively solves the problem that Wi-Fi signals are easy to be eavesdropped. After the Wi-Fi Shield is moved, the terminal will quickly update the information within 80 ms to ensure that the shield moves with the person and the rate of a single terminal does not drop, which can well meet the needs of the government, enterprises, finance, medical and other scenarios with strong security requirements.
The three major industries will prioritize Wi-Fi 7 network upgrades, with AI to improve O&M efficiency
Like any other next-generation communications technology, Wi-Fi 7 will also have priority industry scenarios. Hu Xiangdong told Geek.com that from the perspective of the industry, the three major industries of education, manufacturing, and medical care will give priority to upgrading to Wi-Fi 7 networks. From the perspective of scenarios, office and business-related production scenarios will be migrated to Wi-Fi 7 first.
In the education industry, applications such as high-definition video conferencing, online classrooms, and AR/VR require high network bandwidth and concurrency, and Wi-Fi 7 has advantages in these scenarios to provide a smoother HD video experience. At the same time, in high-density places such as school cafeterias and student dormitories, matching Wi-Fi 7 will also have better results.
In the manufacturing industry, there are a large number of IoT terminals such as machine vision quality inspection, intelligent inspection robots, and AGVs in the production line, warehousing, and logistics of manufacturing scenarios, which need to transmit high-definition images in seconds and quickly update data packets, and these applications need to use Wi-Fi 7 to improve bandwidth and reduce latency.
In the medical industry, a large number of scenarios such as CT reading, remote diagnosis and treatment, and mobile ward rounds, as well as real-time reading of medical images through mobile terminals during ward rounds, all require Wi-Fi 7's high bandwidth and roaming capabilities to provide better assistance, truly practicing "time is life".
Of course, in addition to the above-mentioned typical industry-related scenarios, Wi-Fi 7 will benefit from the comprehensive network capabilities of Wi-Fi 7 in a wider range of daily office environments, such as high-definition video conferencing, cloud desktop data transmission by R&D personnel, remote collaborative design of specific industries, and live broadcast/short video editing transmission of MCN organizations.
Taking the education industry as an example, Huawei has partnered with Southwest Jiaotong University, which has a campus area of 5,000 mu and more than 50,000 teachers and students, to provide Wi-Fi 7 networks in classrooms, libraries, and other areas to ensure that teachers and students can study high-concurrency online courses without lag, in the lecture hall, to meet the high concurrency needs of nearly 300 people, ensuring the smooth convening of key meetings, and at the opening site, the maximum measured Wi-Fi 7 network speed exceeded 4,000 Mbps, an increase of nearly four times.
It is worth mentioning that, considering the multi-terminal/multi-service concurrent access and mobile roaming in large campuses, Hu Xiangdong emphasized the blessing of AI and large model technology on Wi-Fi 7. He pointed out that AI can improve network management efficiency and reduce OPEX in network optimization, fault recovery, and green energy saving. For example, the AI energy-saving solution based on the traffic tide prediction algorithm can automatically generate energy-saving strategies to achieve up to 30% energy-saving effects in scenarios such as school dormitories and office buildings.
Brief summary:
As an important carrier of the development of the digital economy, campuses have always been pioneers in the application of new technologies, and 2024 will coincide with the key breakthrough in the upgrade of Wi-Fi 7 technology, and the global campus network will make great strides towards the 10 Gigabit era. As an important application position for Wi-Fi 7, China's shipments will exceed 20% in 2024, with a three-year compound growth rate of 50%, once again leading the world. In the future, as Huawei's core vendors' solutions continue to mature, almost all industries related to the national economy, such as education, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, finance, and transportation, will continue to enjoy the technological dividends brought by Wi-Fi 7 technology. We look forward to seeing high-quality 10 Gigabit campuses more into reality and bring more and greater surprises to the development of our digital economy.