Connectivity on trains is hard - but both Wi-Fi and cellular need to be provided for passengers

This post originally appeared on May 24 on my LinkedIn feed, which is now my main platform for both short posts and longer-form articles. It can be found here, along with the comment stream. Please follow / connect to me on LinkedIn, to receive regular updates (about 1-3 / week)

 There have been recent headlines about the possible ending of on-train passenger #WiFi services in the UK. It is deeply controversial.

Apparently the Department for Transport (DfT), United Kingdom has insisted rail WiFi must be "justified financially". It's unclear if that means by extra ticket sales, higher customer satisfaction, or the use of WiFi for #train operational functions like cameras and wireless payment terminals.

I hope it's not referring to so-called "monetisation" by customers paying for WiFi, or being served adverts. On trains, WiFi is a basic amenity, like toilets or power sockets.

That said, train WiFi in the UK is often problematic. It uses clunky captive portals, and often old access points & slow/patchy 4G backhaul. It often fails to work well, or at all. It sometimes blocks video or VPNs. By contrast, in-station WiFi is run separately - and often much better.

Public cellular coverage on the rail network is also poor. Many rail lines run through cuttings and tunnels with limited room for trackside infrastructure & poor lines-of-sight to cell towers. The recent Department for Science, Innovation and Technology Wireless Infrastructure Strategy highlighted poor #railway #wireless coverage & pushed for regular monitoring and access to trackside fibre.
 
What should DfT, DSIT, Network Rail, Train Operating Companies and the future restructured Great British Railways Transition Team (GBRTT) do?
 
- Recognise both cellular & WiFi are essential for passengers, especially on long-distance trains where laptops are common
- Understand that cellular - especially #5G - has problems with signals reaching inside train carriages
- Don't underestimate forecasts for future data use. Add in uplink as well as downlink, and think about latency. Trains may need 1-5 Gbps in the medium term, via a mix of cellular & WiFi.
- Ensure on-train WiFi is easy to use & easily-upgraded. No captive portals, no “monetisation” with ads/data capture & a clear roadmap for regular upgrades. No blocking of any apps, especially VPNs and video. Apply Net Neutrality rules.
- Federation or roaming between on-train & station WiFi systems, extending to smart cities & metro bus/train/tram WiFi over time
- Easier access for MNOs / #neutralhosts to build trackside or near-track infrastructure & use gantries & fibre assets
- Decouple passenger connectivity needs from future critical #FRMCS deployment. They have different timing/cadence & investment cases
- Look at trackside 5G neutral host networks delivered with “excess” spectrum from any future 4-3 merger of MNOs
- Insist on-train gateways are modular & can use a dynamic mix of public 5G, trackside wireless & eventually satellite in remote areas. Ensure they are easily upgradeable without trains being taken out of service
- Upgrade on-train signal repeaters & look at window-etching for better outdoor-to-indoor performance

Note: I wrote this on WiFi on a train back to London from this week’s Wi-Fi NOW conference.

 

A rant about 5G myths - chasing unicorns​

Exasperated rant & myth-busting time.

I actually got asked by a non-tech journalist recently "will 5G change our lives?"

Quick answer: No. Emphatically No.

#5G is Just Another G. It's not a unicorn

Yes, 5G is an important upgrade. But it's also *massively* overhyped by the mobile industry, by technology vendors, by some in government, and by many business and technology journalists.

- There is no "race to 5G". That's meaningless geopolitical waffle. Network operators are commercial organisations and will deploy networks when they see a viable market, or get cajoled into it by the terms & timing of spectrum licenses.

- Current 5G is like 4G, but faster & with extra capacity. Useful, but not world-changing.

- Future 5G will mean better industrial systems and certain other cool (but niche) use-cases.

- Most 5G networks will be very patchy, without ubiquitous coverage, except for very rudimentary performance. That means 5G-only applications will be rare - developers will have to assume 4G fallback (& WiFi) are common, and that dead-spots still exist.

- Lots of things get called 5G, but actually aren't 5G. It's become a sort of meaningless buzzword for "cool new wireless stuff", often by people who couldn't describe the difference between 5G, 4G or a pigeon carrying a message.

- Anyone who talks about 5G being essential for autonomous cars or remote surgery is clueless. 5G might get used in connected vehicles (self-driving or otherwise) if it's available and cheap, but it won't be essential - not least as it won't work everywhere (see above).

- Yes, there will be a bit more fixed wireless FWA broadband with 5G. But no, it's not replacing fibre or cable for normal users, especially in competitive urban markets. It'll help take FWA from 5% to 10-12% of global home broadband lines.

- The fact the 5G core is "a cloud-native service based architecture" doesn't make it world-changing. It's like raving about a software-defined heating element for your toaster. Fantastic for internal flexibility. But we expect that of anything new, really. It doesn't magically turn a mobile network into a "platform". Nor does it mean it's not Just Another G.

- No, enterprises are not going to "buy a network slice". The amount of #SliceWash I'm hearing is astonishing. It's a way to create some rudimentary virtualised sub-networks in 5G, but it's not a magic configurator for 100s or 1000s of fine-grained, dynamically-adjusted different permutations all coexisting in harmony. The delusional vision is very far removed from the mundane reality.

- The more interesting stuff in 5G happens in Phase 2/3, when 3GPP Release 16 & then Release 17 are complete, commercialised & common. R16 has just been finalised. From 2023-4 onward we should expect some more massmarket cool stuff, especially for industrial use. Assuming the economy recovers by then, that is.

- Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) sounds great, but it's unclear there's a business case except at very localised levels, mostly for private networks. Actually, UR and LL are two separate things anyway. MNOs aren't going to be able sell reliability unless they also take legal *liability* if things go wrong. If the robot's network goes down and it injures a worker, is the telco CEO going to take the rap in court?

- Getting high-performance 5G working indoors will be very hard, need dedicated systems, and will take lots of time, money and trained engineers. It'll be a decade or longer before it's very common in public buildings - especially if it has to support mmWave and URLLC. Most things like AR/VR will just use Wi-Fi. Enterprises may deploy 5G in factories or airport hangars or mines - but will engineer it very carefully, examine the ROI - and possibly work with a specialist provider rather than a telco.

- #mmWave 5G is even more overhyped than most aspects. Yes, there's tons of spectrum and in certain circumstances it'll have huge speed and capacity. But it's go short range and needs line-of-sight. Outdoor-to-indoor coverage will be near zero. Having your back to a cell-site won't help. It will struggle to go through double-glazed windows, the shell of a car or train, and maybe even your bag or pocket. Extenders & repeaters will help, but it's going to be exceptionally patchy (and need tons of fibre everywhere for backhaul).

- 5G + #edgecomputing is a not going to be a big deal. If low-latency connections were that important, we'd have had localised *fixed* edge computing a decade ago, as most important enterprise sites connect with fibre. There's almost no FEC, so MEC seems implausible except for niches. And even there, not much will happen until there's edge federation & interconnect in place. Also, most smartphone-type devices will connect to someone else's WiFi between 50-80% of the time, and may have a VPN which means the network "egress" is a long way from the obvious geographically-proximal edge.

- Yes, enterprise is more important in 5G. But only for certain uses. A lot can be done with 4G. "Verticals" is a meaningless term; think about applications.

- No, it won't displace Wi-Fi. Obviously. I've been through this multiple times.

- No, all laptops won't have 5G. (As with 3G and 4G. Same arguments).

- No, 5G won't singlehandedly contribute $trillions to GDP. It's a less-important innovation area than many other things, such as AI, biotech, cloud, solar and probably quantum computing and nuclear fusion. So unless you think all of those will generate 10's or 100's of $trillions, you've got the zeros wrong.

- No, 5G won't fry your brain, or kill birds, or give you a virus. Conspiracy theorists are as bad as the hypesters. 5G is neither Devil nor Deity. It's just an important, but ultimately rather boring, upgrade.

There's probably a ton more 5G fallacies I've forgotten, and I might edit this with a few extra ones if they occur to me. Feel free to post comments here, although the majority of debate is on my LinkedIn version of this post (here). This is also the inaugural post for a new LinkedIn newsletter, Most of my stuff is not quite this snarky, but it depends on my mood. I'm @disruptivedean on Twitter so follow me there too.

If you like my work, and either need a (more sober) business advisory session or workshop, let me know. I'm also a frequent speaker, panellist and moderator for real and virtual events.

Just remember: #5GJAG. Just Another G.

Rethinking wireless networks for post-COVID19 Smart Buildings

For the past month or so, I've been thinking about the longer-term technology, policy and business trends that might emerge in the wake of the current pandemic. I'm especially interested in those that could directly or indirectly affect the use and deployment of networks and communications.

I wrote up my initial scenarios for what might lie ahead for the telecoms industry in the recent STL Partners report on COVID-19: Now, Next & After (link), and also discussed them on the STL webinar on the same topic (link). The next update webinar is on May 6th - link. 

I've also participated in other client webinars and podcasts on campus networks (link), private 4G/5G (link) and Wi-Fi6E (link) recently - and I always include a section considering the pandemic's impact. (Any market analysis or opinion formed more than 2 months ago now needs to be reconsidered in the light of the pandemic and coming economic recession).

With that in mind, one area I've started thinking about is that of in-building wireless and smart buildings, especially relating to business locations. (Residential coverage of cellular and better home broadband / Wi-Fi is also top-of-mind, but I'll tackle that separately another time).

Obviously, offices and shopping malls are currently empty in much of the world, but eventually they will return to regular use, to some level at least. Even buildings sadly vacated by companies that cannot survive the economic impact will likely gain new tenants and uses.  


Making buildings pandemic-proof 

We already have building codes and regulations to protect us against fire risks, and even earthquakes. For fires, we have sensors, alarms, fire escapes, drills, signage and so on. In parts of the world there are specific rules governing indoor coverage for public safety radios, and they are being updated as agencies upgrade from P25 / TETRA systems to 4G / 5G critical-communications cellular alternatives.

So what else would it take to make a building "pandemic-proof"? I'm especially interested how we manage social distancing - both during the next phase of recovery and a gradual return to near-normal when a vaccine becomes available, but also during possible future waves of COVID or new entirely outbreaks. 

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis there was a big focus on banks' transparency, financial stability and regulatory "stress tests". I'd be very surprised if equivalent changes don't take place over the next few years - especially as many coronavirus infections are understood to occur indoors.

I've found various articles about smart buildings and the pandemic already, where the main focus seems to be on general hygiene and infection control. Using thermal cameras (and perhaps facial recognition) can automate detection of people with fevers. LED lights can provide disinfection in some cases, and bathroom sensors can help enforce hand-washing. Remote access to building-management systems allow facilities personnel to work from home. Better management of temperature and humidity may reduce the survival time of viruses and bacteria.

I can imagine a range of strategies being adopted in coming years:

• Temperature-detection and hygiene management, as above.
• Ability for remote building-management wherever possible
• Design guidelines for wider corridors and stairways, better ventilation, virus-unfriendly surfaces, automated doors rather than handles, and so on
• Ways to impose, measure and enforce social-distancing rules in emergencies - for example by dynamically lowering maximum numbers of permitted people in enclosed spaces, or digital signs for making corridors or aisles into one-way systems.
• Use of sensors to measure occupancy, density and flow of people, and control entry/exit better
• Automated disinfection systems or processes (maybe using robots)
• Use of occupants' / visitors' phones or other devices to help them navigate / work more safely
• Ability for authorities to use cameras, admission-control and other data for contact-tracing purposes (subject to emergency laws on privacy etc).

Clearly, not all of these can apply to all buildings - and there is obviously a huge spectrum of venue types with different requirements. A supermarket is different to an office block, a corner-shop, a factory or warehouse full of robots. Older buildings are not likely to be able to widen corridors, while a "cube farm" has more flexibility. 

But what that means is that in a future outbreak, a government could say: "Workplaces certified to standard PNDMC-A can remain open, if they reduce occupancy to X, Y & Z metrics. PNDMC-B locations must comply with emergency rules A, B & C. All others must close."

Clearly, those type of rules will incentivise building owners and developers to upgrade their sites wherever possible. While it is too early to guess exactly how the specific regulations might be formulated, there are nonetheless some initial ideas and steps to think through.


The role of networks

Given my own focus on mobile and wireless systems, a key theme immediately leaps to my mind: many of these techniques and practices will require better and wider indoor connectivity than is common today in many places. 

While some building-management systems will be based on wired connections (not least as they'll need cables for power anyway), I expect wireless networks to be extremely important for much of this.

I see wireless networks being employed both indirectly (for connection of sensors, cameras or other devices, such as smartphones used for distancing apps) and directly by using the network itself as a sensing and measurement tool. Indoor mapping and positioning will be needed in tandem with wireless for various use-cases.

There are particular challenges and opportunities for indoor wireless systems here:

• There will be a need to support both public networks (for indoor use of nationwide MNO networks and services) and localised private wireless, for the building or company's own needs.
• Almost inevitably, both 3GPP cellular (4G/5G) and Wi-Fi (5/6/7) will be essential for different use-cases and device types, plus public-safety wireless such as TETRA. In many some cases additional technologies such as Bluetooth low-energy, ZigBee or proprietary systems will also be required as well. 
• All of this will occur while major transitions to 5G (at different frequencies) and private cellular networks are ongoing in coming years.
• Any real-time mobile app, whether it is giving alerts, or uploading updates on location, will be dependent on good wireless connectivity, either via Wi-Fi or in-building cellular connections
• Proximity-based apps (for instance using Bluetooth) will risk false-positives if they are not integrated with building location and indoor-mapping systems. You can safely stay 2 metres from someone infected, if there is a wall or floor/ceiling between you.
• IoT systems such as disinfectant robots will also need access to indoor maps and granular positioning technology.
• Next-generation networks such as private/campus 5G and also recent Wi-Fi meshes have improved wireless-positioning abilities. This could allow both real-time and reported proximity-monitoring - as well as enabling remote working & even "lights out" full automation in industrial settings
• Both Wi-Fi and cellular networks can work out how many devices/users are not just connected, but detected, even if they do not attempt - or are not permitted - to connect to a given system. That could yield good data on user-density, especially if they are personal devices such as smartphones.
• Wi-Fi enhancements already enable motion-detection - which can be considerably more accurate than traditional infra-red, and also work through walls. One technology innovator here is Cognitive Systems (link) but there are others as well. I've also seen suggestions that future 5G variants may be able to do something similar, if deployed with small cells. (I'm not sure how it would work with other in-building shared networks, though).
• Potential to use localised cell-broadcast messaging, or Wi-Fi hotspot captive-portal pages, to distribute public health information and advice
• There may be a growing need to align the indoor wireless network(s) with nearby outdoors connectivity, or link multiple buildings together well. Campus networks are already growing in importance for multiple reasons (link) and social-distancing and control adds another set of use-cases. (Consider private/public spaces such as courtyards, rooftop bars, parking lots and so on).
• The use of virtualised radio networks (or specific variants such as OpenRAN) could also prove valuable here - for instance to enable operators to scale up/down capacity dedicated to indoor 5G wireless systems, or switch radio VNFs between indoor and outdoor coverage. (This goes far beyond pandemic-proofing and I will write about it another time). 
• Neutral-host indoor wireless systems will be able to onboard new tenant networks such as public safety, or private building management networks, depending on future requirements and spectrum licensing policy.
• There may be edge-computing requirements driven by pandemic-proofting, although that doesn't necessarily imply either on-prem or very granular nearby edge facilities, rather than metro-level.

This is still just a very rough draft of my ideas - and clearly there are various policy / regulatory hypotheses here as well as technology direction. I'm not a specialist on building regulations, so it's quite possible I've made unreasonable assumptions. But this is intended as the start of a discussion, rather than a definitive forecast. I expect this topic and more detailed discussion to surface in coming months and years.

Your comments are very welcome - and if you want to get in touch with me directly, please connect on my LinkedIn, or send me a Twitter DM. If you're hosting any webinars, or holding internal brainstorms on this, I'd be very interested in participating.

3rd Neutral Host Workshop + OpenRAN for shared networks. Early bird still available

NOTE: Owing to uncertainty around the impact of Coronavirus on travel, event attendance, company policies & venues, this workshop has been postponed from 31st March until 7th July. We have contacted existing registered attendees to discuss the options

On March 31st  July 7th I'll be running my 3rd public workshop on Neutral Host Networks in central London, together with colleague Peter Curnow-Ford.

As well as covering the basics of new wholesale/sharing models for MNOs, both with and without dedicated spectrum, we will also be looking more closely at the fit between NHNs and new virtualised vRAN / OpenRAN technologies. 

We'll cover all the various use-cases: metro-area network densification, indoor systems for various venues, road/rail coverage, rural wholesale models, FWA and more. 

The links (and differences) between neutral-host and private LTE/5G will be discussed, as well as alternative models such as multi-MNO sharing or national roaming. (see this post for some previous thoughts on this)

Different countries' competitive, regulatory and spectrum positions will be covered, to assess how that will impact the evolution of NHNs. 
 
Early bird pricing is available before June 7th.

Full details and registration are available here

Updates on UK Neutral Host and local spectrum developments

I've written & spoken extensively about the new Ofcom rules for localised spectrum in the UK, both in new "innovation bands" like 3.8-4.2GHz and in secondary licensing of existing MNO national frequencies, such as 2.6GHz. (See here and here). The secondary licensing model is pretty unique, as it allows people to request to use telcos' spectrum resources which are lying fallow, with no plans for build-out in that location by the license holder. It's a bit like the spectrum-leasing model seen in some countries' remote areas for mining or community wireless.

As well as pure private networks, I see value in these bands for neutral-host propositions, and various forms of infill/coverage-extension. NHNs involve third-party operators offering wholesale capacity to MNOs and sometimes other service providers, either in their own spectrum, or some sort of shared infrastructure.

The first* example of the secondary reuse scenario has been announced (link), by Digital Colony's unit StrattoOpencell and Vodafone. OpenCell now has access to VF's 2.6GHz band, for a private LTE network covering a holiday site for caravans, in Devon in SW England. Most of OpenCell's previous focus has been on in-building, although in the last few months it has acquired outdoor assets as well.

The site currently uses Wi-Fi to provide broadband to caravans, as running fibre to each doesn't really make sense. However, there is significant interference between the outdoor site Wi-Fi and any "indoor" hotspots used within each of the thin-walled mobile homes for connecting PCs and other devices. 

The idea is to provide fixed-access 4G from a central LTE base station, to a Wi-Fi unit in each caravan. The cost will be paid for as part of plot rental fees charged by the site owner to the residents/visitor, bundled in with power and water and so on.

For now, this is a Private LTE service for local FWA. But it could be extended to SIMs for onsite mobile devices (perhaps the site's own staff phones or IoT devices), or support Vodafone's smartphone MBB subscribers onsite. I guess it could also handle WiFi-Calling / SMS for other MNOs' users (if the signal is strong enough and the phones set up correctly) or perhaps even allow roaming. 

I'm not sure if the agreements with Vodafone and Ofcom to reuse spectrum locally would allow full neutral-host, broadcasting the IDs of the other UK MNOs, though. Maybe as the various network-sharing and national-roaming options under consideration by the UK Government evolve, that could be a possibility.

In theory, I also guess Vodafone could have offered this by itself, either to the site owners or the individual tenants, but most MNOs aren't really geared up to work on individualised local business-models such as this, especially if they involve new infrastructure, new pricing plans and so on. It is also unlikely to set up a "micro-MVNO" for the site owner, if it needs to install hardware in a new location.

This is something of a new variant of private and Neutral Host mobile - and one of the first I've seen to use local secondary spectrum, rather than national licenses acquired by a wholesale specialist (such as Dense Air, in Ireland or NZ). 

I could also imagine a future vertical-sector specialist (let's say a new firm called Camping Mobile) could try to do this for multiple sites, perhaps working with OpenCell or other NHN providers as technical enablers.

There definitely seems to be a bit of race between the new US CBRS deployments, and the UK's new local spectrum models, to see which gets the most innovative new concepts and mobile networks to market. The German industrial 5G band and a few others are worth watching too. 

I'm tracking and speaking to numerous NHN providers in the UK and elsewhere - and it's pretty fascinating how diverse their spectrum, backhaul and go-to-market strategies are. For 5G, rather than 4G, there's an interesting overlap with Open RAN as well, but that's a post for another time.

If you're interested in a deeper dive, I'm hosting my 2nd NHN public workshop on November 21st in London. See (here) for details, or (here) to discuss a private internal advisory engagement.


*This is the first example to be based on Ofcom's new licensing regime. Arguably a trial deployment from friend James Body's Ch4lke Mobile / Telet Research got there first in concept (see here and here). There's also early NHN trials at some of the UK's DCMS 5G testbed projects, such as AutoAir and 5GRuralFirst, and private cellular at several others.

5G & Neutral-Host Thought Experiment #1

Reposted & extended from original LinkedIn post (link) - main comment thread on that page

Here's a thought experiment, to test your ideas about 5G, indoor wireless, neutral-host networks, URLLC and network-slicing.

It's a plausible scenario which seems simple, but actually has lots of complexities. It's the sort of thing that marketing departments might suggest as a use-case for 5G, but in reality, "it's not that simple".

Imagine it's the year 2025. 

There's a large office building on a business park... with a faulty elevator. The elevator company sends out one of its local maintenance engineers, who works as a contractor. 

He arrives with an AR headset, running an application to deliver repair instructions and record the fix, linked to the manufacturer's cloud-based diagnostics, image-analysis and compliance/recording platform. Given the safety issues such as fall-risks, it needs a low-latency connection to avoid the risk of nausea and distraction. 

But.... what's the network coverage like in the lift-shaft? Is there outside-in signal with <1GHz 5G? Or is there a DAS or multi-operator small-cell system? Is there a private cellular network with local spectrum? Does it support integration with all outdoor / public networks equally well? Can it support URLLC with a guaranteed SLA? What network is the engineer's headset SIM registered on, anyway? Is there a voice/video connection for looping in a remote expert? And how would that work?

Whose responsibility is all of this? Is it down to the building owner? A smart-building specialist? A neutral-host provider? Should the elevator manufacturer integrate local connectivity with Wi-Fi or 5G NR-U? How do they deal with sub-contractors? Is it possible for "slices" or performance guarantees to work on the indoor (possibly private) network? Is there a separate core network for the indoor system? Who designs, tests or pays for it? Who's liable if the network fails? Is there any need for edge-compute and storage as part of the application design - and if so, where is it and how is it accessed?
  
There are no easy answers here. The real world for many "5G" applications is going to have to deal with these heterogeneous situations, with workarounds and fallbacks. 

In this case, it seems pretty clear that the AR headset will have to have an offline mode, with blueprints & manuals stored on itself, or the engineer's phone or PC. Or the engineer will use the headset to record video, and then go back outside the building to upload it & call in for advice. Inefficient, but safer. When good-quality coverage is available inside the elevator shaft, the work can be concluded faster & more reliably - but it won't always be possible.


This is the first of a series of "5G Thought Experiments" that will help people think more about realistic scenarios and use-cases. I'll be focusing on ones that touch on opportunities for 5G, Wi-Fi6, neutral-host, cloud-native and private cellular. I'll be doing some as podcasts, so sign up here. I'll also be touching on these in my upcoming Neutral Host workshop on November 21st 2019. Details here.

Thoughts on in-building wireless - and an upcoming client webinar

I've been pondering some of the side-effects and necessary enablers of the accelerating wireless evolution path we're seeing. As well as spectrum issues I've covered a lot recently, deploying indoor infrastructure is going to be another one of them. 

It is not a new assertion that indoor networks are important for enterprise. The frustrations of poor indoor cellular coverage are universal, while businesses of all types need to provide employees and guests with high-quality Wi-Fi.

(I'll cover trends in home Wi-Fi in a later post, while I've already written about industrial facilities in a number of previous ones, such as here, as the issues are as much about spectrum as about infrastructure and planning.)

Various solutions abound for providing good signal indoors – distributed antenna systems (DAS), small cells, or even just deployment of lower-frequency bands in outdoor networks, with better penetration through walls. Yet costs remain considerable, especially as usage increases near-exponentially. Upgrading or retro-fitting existing installations often requires hard economic decisions, given that most such investments are not directly “monetised”. Suitable expertise, foresight, planning tools and ongoing monitoring/reporting are important.

The future, however, will accelerate the role of in-building/on-site wireless connectivity – in both predictable and unpredictable fashion. If we consider what a building might look like in the year 2030, say – and how it may be used and occupied – we can start to see the challenges and opportunities.

As well as today’s well-known and well-described uses of wireless (smartphones and laptops on Wi-Fi and cellular networks), we can expect to see a huge number of new uses emerge. This means that today’s implementations will require future-proofing, to support the unknowns of tomorrow. For example, consider the implications of: 

• IoT deployments for smart buildings, such as a proliferation of sensors for heating, security, or the operation of elevators. These may require better coverage in unusual places – in ceiling voids, lift-shafts, basements and so on. Bandwidth and latency requirements will vary hugely, from life-critical but low-data fire/carbon monoxide sensors, to networked video cameras, or once-an-hour reporting from water tanks.
• Moving devices such as robots or automated trolleys, delivering products around the building. While some will be fully-autonomous, others will need constant wireless connectivity and control.
• 5G networks will be deployed from around 2020, with further evolutions in following years. These may be extremely demanding on in-building coverage solutions, especially as some networks are likely to use frequencies above 6GHz – perhaps even as high as 80GHz. Extensive use of MIMO and beam-forming may also add complexity to indoor implementations. (A new variant of WiFi known as WiGig also uses 60GHz frequencies)
• Likely huge growth in narrowband wireless, connecting low-powered (but maybe very dense) networks of sensors or other endpoints. These may use 3GPP technologies such as NB-IoT, or other options such as LoRa and SigFox.

All of these trends imply very different traffic patterns. It is not realistic just to extrapolate from current usage – robots may go to places in buildings where humans do not, for example. Mobility requirements may evolve – and so will regulations.

It is not just new classes of device and application which will need to be supported by well-designed coverage infrastructure, but also new classes of service provider that need to access them.

• The advent of new unlicensed or shared-spectrum models of frequency allocation (eg CBRS in the US, or MuLTEfire) may mean the arrival of new operator types – dedicated IoT solutions providers that “bring their own wireless”; enterprises acting as their own local on-site MNOs; various models of “neutral host” and so on.
• Private enterprise cellular networks are starting to become more widespread. Some governments are allocating spectrum for industries like utilities or smart-cities, while equipment vendors are offering optimised enterprise-grade cellular infrastructure.
• Potential future regulations for emergency-services wireless connections. Police and fire authorities are increasingly using broadband mobile, both for humans and remote-sensing devices.
• Distributed-mesh service providers, that operate as decentralised networks with micropayments, or as community initiatives. Some may use blockchain-type arrangements for shared-ownership or membership fees.

One of the unknowns is about the convergence (or divergence) of different network types. On one hand, cellular networks are embracing Wi-Fi for offload, or for multi-network aggregation, especially as they worry that returning flat-rate data plans may stress their networks. On the other, some networks are looking at running 4G/5G in unlicensed spectrum instead of (or in addition to) Wi-Fi. Yet more service providers are adopting a “Wi-Fi first” approach, reverting to MVNO models for cellular where needed. Future permutations will likely be more complex still. All will (ideally) need to be well-suppported by indoor wireless infrastructure.

For property developers and owners, the quality of indoor networks is increasingly key in determining valuations and rental occupancy. Already seen in hotels, and office new builds, it will be important for today’s new constructions and refurbishments to support adequate flexibility and headroom for the next decade or more.

This takes on further emphasis if you consider the trend towards “buildings-as-a-service”, exemplified by organisations such as WeWork. These new classes of facility often incorporate wireless connectivity both as a billable service element, but also to enable their owners to manage the properties effectively, in terms of energy-efficiency and security. Other forms of monetisation and data-analytics around wireless location-sensing/tracking are also becoming more important.

Lastly, in-building challenges will be driven by the specific location and industry, which themselves may change in nature over the next decade. New building materials, construction practices and regulations will impact wireless in unpredictable ways – more metallic insulation perhaps, but also perhaps robot or pre-fabricated construction allowing wireless systems to be installed more easily. Individual industry verticals will have their own shifts – what will retail stores look like, and how will customers behave, in the era of home deliveries by drone, but more on-premise “experiences”, perhaps with AR/VR systems? What workplaces of the future look like, in an era of self-driving vehicles? Industrial facilities will become increasingly automated, with the largest uses of wireless connections being machines rather than humans. Hotels and airports will see shifts in data connectivity needs from employees and visitors, as application usage shifts.

Small cells look certain to play a more important role in future, and Wi-Fi is going to remain the most important indoor technology for many users and businesses (ignore the fantasists who think it's at risk from 4G / 5G - see my earlier post here).

There are no easy answers here – even if you construct good scenarios for the future, undoubtedly we will be surprised by events. But some form of upfront discipline in designing and building indoor wireless solutions is ever more critical, given the unknowns. The more future-proofing is possible, the lower the potential risk of being caught out.

  

On October 5^th, at 3pm BST / 4pm CET / 10am EDT, I will be presenting on some of these topics on a webinar for client iBwave. A link to the event is here