At the end of this blog, we answer the following frequently asked questions in addition to other topics:
Q1. What is WiFi?
Q2. What is WiFi 6?
Q3. What is Cloud Computing?
What’s the Deal With Cloud-managed WiFi?
Cloud computing and various kinds of applications and services that can be offered on the cloud are gaining popularity day by day. According to a leading analyst firm, Enterprise cloud services revenue will grow to $31.9 billion worldwide by 2017. With the technological evolution and considering the scale of variety of offerings available on the cloud, next-generation networks services like WiFi and its offerings are also made cloud accessible.’
A standardized cloud-based platform will enable operators to leverage their existing WiFi capabilities as well as launch new services effortlessly. The hosted and managed cloud-based WiFi platform can easily respond to the needs of today’s service providers and enterprises to deliver innovative and cost-effective services through the cloud thus enabling them with automated processes to capitalize on their market opportunity and launch differentiated services quickly.
What Are the Benefits of Managed WiFi Service Platform?
Here are three reasons why enterprises are more open to the idea of managed WiFi service platform today:
- Cost Savings
Delivering network services over the cloud ensures CapEx savings with hardware and infrastructure reduction, reduced resource spend with cloud-based WiFi deployments something a managed WiFi solutions provider can easily counterbalance. This further enables increased customer satisfaction and lowers churn.
- Quick Time to Market
Today’s fast-paced business environment requires processes and procedures to be conducted in a rapid yet simple fashion. The cloud-based WiFi model enables easy integration and migration, faster performance, better operational efficiency and increases agility with reduced implementation & set up time from 9 weeks to 3 days for a standard-based solution eliminating hassles and headaches while accelerating their ROI.
- On-Demand Scaling
Ensures the scale to support the rich subscriber base of the operator and the flexibility to manage service preparation ensuring real-time availability of services. Both large and small operators can launch and modify their services quickly using a platform hosted at a centralized location, allowing operators to use standards-based technologies and prepare for future expansion while capturing ever-growing customer market share.
How Can Benefits of Cloud-managed WiFi Be Availed?
The benefits of cloud-managed WiFi are plenty; however, it’s essential that you partner with the right vendor to successfully meet market demand and overcome your most pressing business challenges. To experience and take advantage of all the above-mentioned benefits, explore Elitecore WiFi Service Management Platform (SMP) on the cloud with fully virtualized architecture in a multi-tenant deployment mode. With a comprehensive and pre-integrated Cloud-based platform, Elitecore offers the hosted and managed model as Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS). It is a deployment-ready platform easily available for PoC and demonstration purpose.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is WiFi?
Put simply, Wifi is a technology that uses radio waves to create a wireless network through which devices like mobile phones, computers, printers etc., connect to the internet. A wireless router is needed to establish a Wifi hotspot that people in its vicinity may avail to get access to internet services. You’re sure to have encountered such a Wifi hotspot in houses, offices, restaurants, etc.
To get a little more technical, Wifi works by enabling a Wireless Local Area Network or WLAN, that allows for devices connected to it to exchange signals with the internet via a router. The frequencies of these signals are either 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz bandwidths. These frequencies are much higher than those transmitted to or by radios, mobile phones, and televisions since Wifi signals need to carry significantly greater amounts of data. The networking standards are variants of 802.11, of which there are several (802.11a, 802.11b, 801.11g, etc.).
Q2. What is WiFi 6?
WiFi stands for Wireless Fidelity and is also a common name for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). WiFi 6 is the newest and fastest version of the WiFi 802.11 wireless local area network specification standard. IEEE 802.11ax or commonly marketed as WiFi 6 by the industry body WiFi-Alliance is a major advancement over its previous generation that offers multiple devices to run concurrently on one network without compromising on the data speeds and response times.
The 802.11ax standard was approved by the IEEE on 9th February 2021 is designed to operate between 1 and 7.125 GHz, including the widely used 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. To better understand, WiFi or Wireless Fidelity devices usually translate radio waves into binary code using a technique called QAM ie Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. The older generations of WiFi are capable of 256 QAM ie it could send 8 bits of binary data in a single transmission whereas WiFi 6 is capable of 1024 QAM ie 10 bits of binary data in a single transmission.
This significant increase helps WiFi 6 devices to provide 30% faster speeds than its predecessors. The previous WiFi standards like 802.11/a/g/n/ac used OFDM which meant all of the subcarriers or tones were allocated to a single device at any instance of time. WiFi 5 introduced Multi-user MIMO enabling multiple users on the wireless medium at the same time thereby adding multiple users across different streams with each device using all of the subcarriers.
With WiFi 6, OFDMA can now portion up the individual sub-carriers or tones and these can be allocated to a number of devices. Apart from greater bandwidths, higher data speeds snd lower latencies, WiFi 6 also offers better spectrum utilisation using orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), Multi-user MIMO support, better power consumption and enhanced security protocols.
Q3. What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a paradigm that allows On-demand network access to shared computing resources. A model for managing, storing and processing data online via the internet. The three major characteristics of cloud computing are On-Demand Service, Network Access, and shared resources.
There are three major delivery models of cloud computing namely Software as a service (for end-users), Platform as a service (for developers), and Infrastructure as a service (for system administrators).
1) Software as a service or SaaS is a new method of delivering software applications. Instead of accessing the software from local servers (a powerful computer system), it uses the internet for getting access to the software applications. For it to be considered as SaaS the software needs to be delivered either through a web interface or a mobile application. For eg Microsoft 365, Salesforce CRM, Google suite apps, etc.
2) Platform as a service or PaaS is made up of a programing language execution environment, an operating system, a web server, and a database. The service enables users to build, run and compile the programs without the need for an underlying infrastructure. Apart from the data and application resources, everything else is managed by the service-providing vendor. For eg. AWS, Azure, Google App engine, etc.
3) Infrastructure as a service or IaaS is a service that offers computing architecture & infrastructure and computing resources like data storage, virtualisation, servers & networking in a virtual environment so that multiple users can access them. Apart from Applications, Data, Runtime, and Middleware, everything else is managed by the service-providing vendor. For eg Cisco Metacloud, Rackspace, Amazon EC2, etc.
Uses of Cloud Computing include: Developing cloud-native applications on the go; Secure, Efficient & Reliable storage capability; Audio and Video streaming; On-Demand Software, Platforms & Infrastructure; Online Test and Build ecosystem support; Data Analytics; Embedded Intelligence; Scalability & Speed.
