Security & Enterprise Networks Archives - Page 5 of 17

Today, CommScope announced an enterprise-class, Wi-Fi 7 Access Point (AP), making the company the largest enterprise-class WLAN vendor outside China to announce an AP that supports the cutting-edge standard. When the R770 begins shipping in December it will take its place on the Wi-Fi 7 shelf with APs from H3C that are already shipping, from Huawei that have been delivered to over 50 customers, and from EnGenius that are expected to ship in November. HFCL has also promised several OpenWiFi Wi-Fi 7 APs, although none of them support the new 6 GHz band.

For some in the industry, these announcements seem early, since the standard underlying Wi-Fi 7, named 802.11be, is not expected to receive the IEEE’s official stamp of approval until 2024. The Wi-Fi Alliance has not announced a timeline for its AP certification process, either.

This fact did not stop today’s announcement by CommScope, who released details of the new AP which is based on a Qualcomm chipset. CommScope Ruckus representatives confirmed to us that the company will begin selling the R770 before it has been certified and begin certification as soon as the process is available.

Now that the new Wi-Fi standard is a reality, it is legitimate to ask the question: What value are enterprises really going to get from upgrading to Wi-Fi 7?

This time around, the IEEE has spun its magic to obtain much higher speeds than previous generations of WLAN technology. 802.11be was labeled “Extremely High Throughput” and, in theory, brings 5 times more throughput compared to 802.11ax, which was commercialized as both Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Speed improvements have been made possible by the introduction of a higher order modulation scheme and wider channels, among other innovations.

In reality, throughput speeds will not match the theoretical maximums and will depend on several variables. The maximum data transfer rates of the newly announced Wi-Fi 7 APs are two to four times the rates of similar Wi-Fi 6 products, which gives enterprises an idea of the improvements they can realistically target.

The ability to improve data rates will be a boon for enterprises who are experiencing Wi-Fi congestion as their employees return to the office, relying heavily on videoconferencing applications. But Wi-Fi 7 will bring more than just higher bandwidth. Evolved security, lower latency and enhanced power efficiency could also push an enterprise to upgrade its Wi-Fi network.

One of the headline features of 802.11be, called MLO or Multi-Link Operations, has been the subject of several academic papers. Tests have demonstrated that the ability to communicate over multiple radio interfaces (for example by switching rapidly between bands) lowers latency and increases reliability. CommScope has jumped on this advancement. The R770 supports MLO across all three frequency bands: the legacy 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands as well as the freshly minted 6 GHz. However, it is important to consider that MLO needs to be supported on both the AP and the end device.

On the device side, several smartphone manufacturers have announced Wi-Fi 7 in their line-up, and some of them explicitly call out MLO. Xaiomi was early to the Wi-Fi 7 market with the M13 Pro and other manufacturers have followed suit, with the most recent announcement from Google, adding the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro to the Wi-Fi 7 device list.

As enterprises upgrade their Wi-Fi networks to the latest generation, they will need to think about more than acquiring new APs. The availability of switch ports and the cabling infrastructure is of particular importance, as all of the Wi-Fi 7 APs introduced to the market so far have a 10 Gbps port to connect the AP to the switch. This will be a fundamental change for many organizations, whose APs currently have uplinks that range between 1 and 5 Gbps. Many enterprises will need to upgrade cabling infrastructure to Cat 6A and may find the distance limitation of 100 meters (328 feet) problematic. Huawei’s AirEngine 8771-X1T also has a fiber 10 Gbps port, opening the possibility for enterprises to lay optical cable or a combined fiber-electrical cable.

The value of Wi-Fi 7 is in the higher order modulation and in the MLO, but most of all in the access to the new 6 GHz frequency band. Enterprises that operate in regions of the world whose regulators have freed up the whole 6 GHz band – such as North America, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, have the most to gain. Enterprises in countries where unlicensed use of the 6 GHz band is not permitted, such as China and India, will benefit from incremental improvements without the lower congestion and larger channel widths introduced with the new frequency.

Sales of Wi-Fi 7 APs are expected to remain relatively small in 2023 and will begin to become material next year – a year that may be difficult for some Wireless LAN manufacturers. After living through two years of component shortages and ballooning backorders, manufacturers have released a huge wave of enterprise-class WLAN APs in the past three quarters. We expect 2024 will be a digestion period, a pause while enterprises deploy their equipment and distributors clear the excess inventory from the channel. If this scenario plays out as we expect, Wi-Fi 7 sales may be the bright spot of the year, enticing enterprises to refresh old networks with higher-priced, cutting-edge equipment.

While the vendors are gearing up for new sales, the industry as a whole is busy developing new use cases for the Extremely High Throughput Wi-Fi. The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and its partners have documented their vision that by supporting higher speeds, lower latency, and higher density deployments, Wi-Fi 7 will play a pivotal role in the Enterprise Metaverse and Industrial IoT. The industry organization is also actively collaborating with its members to conduct field trials of these technologies in real-life Wi-Fi 7 networks.

A recent discussion with Bruno Thomas, CTO of the WBA, served to emphasize the innovation that the new protocol will bring to the market. “Wi-Fi 7 will enable enterprise use cases that have been impractical or impossible with other wired of wireless technologies. It will drive innovation…in vertical sectors like healthcare for telemedicine, and within industrial settings for machine-to-machine communication, remote monitoring and predictive maintenance.” In other words, we are on the doorstep of a critical intersection. Technological advances have combined with a brand-new frequency band, and enterprise connectivity has leapt into the future.

Enterprise Class WLAN sales increased by 47% Y/Y in the first half of 2023. With this meteoric acceleration in manufacturer revenues as a backdrop, industry luminaries gathered in Toronto this week at the Wi-Fi World Congress North America. Wi-Fi NOW’s CEO, Claus Hetting, hosted and facilitated the conference, peppering the speakers with questions that highlighted the innovation and thought leadership in the room. Chetan Hebbalae, formerly at Meta on TIP’s OpenWiFi project, and now VP of Products at Kyrio, summarized the essence of the event by quoting science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Advanced technology was on full display as Akoustis showed off the company’s ultra-wide bandwidth RF filters, used in HPE’s 655 access point (AP). Dave Aichele, VP of Business Development, explained that Akoustis’s mastery of material science allowed the Wi-Fi 6E AP to make full use of the new 6 GHz band, one of the few APs on the market to do so. Qorvo referenced the increased power consumption of triband APs, pointing to the power conservation of their Front End Module (FEM), and the increased competition in the FEM market keeping them on their toes.

At their booth, VVDN Technologies displayed a Wi-Fi 7 AP produced from their cutting-edge reference design. The enterprise market is seeing early product announcements in the new 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) protocol, with H3C already selling a flagship product in China and EnGenius promising an AP in November.

Malcolm Smith of Cisco’s CTO Advisor group described how TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) with scheduling in Wi-Fi 6 and 7 could lead to bounded latency for applications such as VR. Hyper directional antennas were evangelized by Bill Anderson, AmpThink’s founder, as a game changer in stadium deployments, allowing installations at a quarter of the cost of under-seat APs. Bart Giordano, President of Ruckus at CommScope focused on the technology that has been front of mind for IT leaders since the advent of Chat GPT; explaining that the drastic reduction in the cost to train AI models will revolutionize not just enterprise WLAN, but all jobs in all domains.

The advanced science turned to the magic that Arthur C. Clarke predicted, as speakers and panelists shifted to discuss use cases and end-user experience. Elizabeth Parks, President of Parks Associates, kicked off the second day of the conference by promising that the 4^th industrial revolution would be all about services and pointing to the enormous Wi-Fi opportunity in the MDU market. Only between 1 and 2% of MDU homes have access to a managed Wi-Fi service. Robert Grosz, President of WorldVue, urged conference attendees to focus on the needs of MDU property owners by emphasizing Wi-Fi as a capital asset with revenue potential, instead of just an expense.

There were plenty of other Wi-Fi use cases discussed, both practical and entertaining.

Bahador Amiri, Senior Director of Wireless Engineering at Cisco, explained that a combination of different location technologies: GPS, Wi-Fi FTM (Fine Timing Measurement or 802.11mc), and 802.11az, among others, enables asset tracking, indoor navigation, and smart workspaces. He then took the audience on a cruise ship journey, with room doors that unlocked automatically, guests that were prevented from enjoying the amenities until they had watched the safety video, and a drinks service that delivered your order wherever you were on the ship – with all of these use cases relying on Wi-Fi location services.

Keeping the focus on user experience, Michael Penney, SVP of Engineering at American Bandwidth, promised to turn Wi-Fi APs into mini cell towers, using Passpoint and OpenRoaming to transparently move end users between cell and Wi-Fi service – solving the problems related to poor cell coverage indoors.

Amidst the speakers’ presentations and panels, some contentious questions were addressed, answered, or debated during the conference.

Will Campus Network As A Service expand Wi-Fi’s addressable market? There was a divergence of opinion on whether Campus NaaS was an innovative architecture or a new business model. Bob Friday, CTO and Co-Founder of Juniper’s Mist, pointed to the foundational role that AI operations played in automating Wi-Fi management. Nile’s impressive demo underlined the service’s potential. Dell’Oro Group has quantified the size of this market and its accretive potential in an Advanced Research Report entitled Campus NaaS and Public Cloud Managed LAN.

Will private 5G take market share from Wi-Fi? AmpThink’s Bill Anderson presented a fascinating analysis of two stadium deployments, one with Wi-Fi and one with cellular technology. The Wi-Fi installation was 105 times less expensive than the private cellular deployment, dropping the price per Tb from $3.9 M to $0.192 M. With its Zero Effort Networking (ZEN), American Bandwidth’s Michael Penney decried the onus of having to prove to a carrier that indoor coverage is bad, with a call to focus on user experience instead. Says Penney: indoors, Wi-Fi is the clear winner.

Is there an advantage to disaggregating Wi-Fi? OpenWiFi was front and center in a panel discussion with representatives from several companies, along with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), demonstrating the breadth of the ecosystem. Tony Stramandinoli, VP of sales at Edgecore, explained that his company’s focus on AP hardware, and using OpenWiFi software, has enabled faster innovation. Robert Grosz of WorldVue, who deploys networks with Ruckus, Aruba, Meraki, and Cambium, has also deployed OpenWiFi solutions. He explained that after a family moves out of an apartment in an MDU, the cleaning crew can rip out or paint over the AP accidentally. For this use case, disaggregating the hardware from the software is most beneficial! Opening up the interface between the controller and the AP enables redundancy of hardware suppliers. C3Spectra and NetExperience are two companies that offer OpenWiFi compliant controllers. An SDK interface encourages innovation at the application level, highlighted by GoZone and Spectra who develop compatible application suites. Bernard Herscovici, CEO of NetExperience, referenced Purchase Orders for 5 Million Open Wi-Fi APs.

The buzz of the Wi-Fi Now Toronto event was palpable. During an evening of fancy cocktails, attendees lined up to get a signed copy of Greg Ennis’s book, Beyond Everywhere: How Wi-Fi Became the World’s Most Beloved Technology. Bart Giordano highlighted the depth of experience in attendance as he quipped that despite being around since 802.11g, he didn’t even merit a footnote in Greg’s book. With a Wi-Fi ecosystem this deep and broad, it’s no wonder it can spin science into magic.

Since 2020, a change in network usage patterns has imposed new requirements on IT infrastructure. Enterprises, educational institutions, and governments have experienced a seismic shift in the way they operate. Some organizations now have an entirely remote workforce. Other businesses have hybrid models, with a variety of work-from-home and work-in-the-office permutations. Even companies with exclusively on-site employees have enabled new video applications. Videoconferencing improves employee efficiency but also swamps the network with traffic, exposing network performance problems.

Defining the Future of Campus Networks

Amidst these profound changes in work patterns, enterprises are renewing their strategic IT plans. Companies must ensure that investments in their communications infrastructure support their current work patterns–but also that they are on a path to meet their future needs. Luckily, while enterprises are focusing on understanding today’s requirements, IEEE committees are playing a foundational role in developing IT standards for the future.

The IEEE 802 standards committee is responsible for the evolution of local, metropolitan, and other area networks. They tend to work with the two lower layers of the OSI reference model (the Data Link and Physical layers) and refer to the IETF’s work to define the upper layers.

For example, the evolution of Wireless LAN protocols, as defined by the 802.11 WLAN working group, has been addressing organizations’ hunger for more wireless bandwidth in campus networks. With each successive 802.11 version, enhancements to modulation and coding schemes have increased spectral efficiency and lowered interference. Each WLAN standard has increased its maximum theoretical link rate, with Wi-Fi 7’s maximum rate over 75 times that of Wi-Fi 4, shown below.

However, the IEEE 802.11 organization focuses on more than increasing throughput. Made up of a multitude of discussion groups, study groups and more formal work groups, the IEEE is working to improve IoT (Internet of Things) functions, reliability, latency, power consumption and security of the LAN. All of these new capabilities should be considered by enterprises that are committed to transforming their networks.

Organizations Begin Their Network Transformations

To meet the dramatic shift in employee work behaviors, companies are rethinking the optimal use of office space. In its 2022 Occupancy Benchmarking Program, the CBRE (a global leader in commercial real estate services and investments), found that 87% of commercial real estate occupiers surveyed from across the world wanted to optimize their real estate portfolios. In the survey, real estate occupiers identified the need to invest in technology that integrated physical and virtual work experience.

Many different enterprise verticals are investing in IT infrastructure to meet new requirements. For instance:

Multinational banks with high volumes of video conference traffic.
Municipal Governments with wireless-first, smart city roadmaps.
Real estate owners and operators providing high-end WLAN coverage to their tenants in dense urban environments.
Universities transitioning to a Wi-Fi-only model for their students and staff and preparing for immersive learning by means of AR/VR applications.
Manufacturers interested in integrating WLAN in their operations, requiring low-latency and deterministic connectivity.
Retail operations revolutionizing processes such as self-checkout, inventory management and product labelling.

From our discussions with systems integrators, manufacturers, service providers and enterprises, we have identified five key trends that will reshape the enterprise LAN over the next three to five years.

1. A Wi-Fi First strategy

Prior to 2020, many IT departments worked with a standard metric of “number of Ethernet ports per desk”. For companies with employees working from home or in a hybrid model, this metric is no longer valid.

Wi-Fi first implies the deployment of low-density Access Points (APs) to provide connectivity in areas where there had previously been Ethernet ports, such as dorm rooms or low-density cubicles. Wi-Fi first can also involve covering common areas with high-density, high-performance APs to accommodate surges in traffic, such as in conference rooms or stadiums. Finally, a Wi-Fi first strategy often involves providing WLAN signals in new areas that had never had connectivity before; for example, urban centers, company patios, or school gymnasiums.

In addition to ensuring that the WLAN is delivering high bandwidth with low interference, an enterprise must ensure that the network backbone can support the traffic. Organizations’ strategic IT plans must include a provision for the growing bandwidth of WLAN uplink ports.

Most enterprise APs shipped today are equipped with a 1 Gbps port. However, APs supporting the latest standards are capable of higher data transfer rates; they can support 2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps or even 10 Gbps interfaces. As Wi-Fi 7 is adopted in the market, we expect 10 Gbps ports to grow considerably, allowing higher bandwidth applications to operate in the LAN.

2. A Smarter Network Means Efficiency and Automation

With new demands on the network, organizations need a better understanding of how their facilities are being used. A wide range of applications and services are available to provide insights into meeting room occupancy, environmental readings, and the location of assets.

To enable these insights, enterprises are integrating more and more “things”, instead of just “people”, onto their LANs. The IoT can involve wired devices, such as security cameras and monitors for video conference rooms. The IoT can also rely on wireless devices, such as occupancy sensors, electronic labels, or environmental sensors.

Some devices, such as video cameras or VR headsets, can increase LAN traffic considerably. However, organizations also need to consider the growing need for Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports on their campus switches. These ports are required to deliver more power to high performance APs, as well as to devices such as cameras. We expect that the percentage of switch ports that support PoE will continue to rise as the demand for high-end devices grows.

In addition to feeding applications with data to improve enterprise efficiency, the next generation of campus technology allows for the automation of network management. AI-Ops refers to features that use advanced analytics to simplify network operations, helping to filter alarms, predict network performance issues, or even automatically suggest and apply fixes to network problems.

The head of IT of one organization with which we spoke was amazed that activating AI-Ops features in the campus LAN uncovered existing network configuration problems that were previously undetected; these problems had been affecting quality of service for years. In addition to improving the user experience, AI-Ops reduced the number of trouble tickets by 95%.

3. Emphasis on Sustainability

Enterprises concerned with the environment are analyzing every step in their value chains to eliminate waste, decrease dependence on non-renewable resources, and reduce power consumption.

Initiatives that environmentally conscious enterprises are taking in their LANs include:

Configuring Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) on switch ports, which moves ports to a low-power state when they are not carrying traffic.
Replacing high-capacity copper cable with fiber. Fiber-optic Ethernet cables can support 10 Gbps and higher, and they can withstand longer distances with lower losses.
Flattening the network hierarchy and reducing the number of switches in the network.
Purchasing equipment made of recycled materials and packaged in a sustainable manner.
Moving to commercial models (such as Campus Network as a Service) that incorporate the re-purposing of old IT equipment when it is replaced.

4. Low-Latency Communications

WLAN revenues generated from sales to manufacturing companies grew by more than $500 Million in 2022, an increase that exceeds the growth in any other vertical that we track. Industries that adopt wireless infrastructure for their industrial processes often need low-latency, deterministic communications.

In November 2018, the IEEE 802.11 Real Time Applications Topic Interest Group (RTA-TIG) published a report outlining the usage model and technical requirements of an array of real-time applications. The report cites a wide range of applications for industrial systems. Applications categorized as “Class B”̶ including AR/VR and remote Human-Machine Interaction ̶ had a latency bound requirement of between 10 and 1 ms, with “latency bound” defined as the worst-case one-way latency measured at the application layer.

Other verticals, apart from manufacturing, will also require low-latency capabilities. For instance, VR or AR applications relying on interactive video are relevant to logistics, education, and retail verticals.

As low-latency applications become more common, deploying Wi-Fi 7 will be an important initiative for enterprises. A study at Virginia Tech showed that Wi-Fi 7, with its inclusion of Multi Link Operations (MLO), lowers the latency of communications by allowing devices to operate in multiple bands simultaneously. Enterprises can also benefit from Wi-Fi 7’s ability to support a diversity of channel widths. By means of the judicious assignment of certain channels to latency-sensitive applications, enterprises will be able to lower the latency for the users who are most sensitive to this parameter.

In addition to upgrading to Wi-Fi 7, enterprises may further lower latency by investing in local computing infrastructure to avoid processing data from latency-sensitive applications in the cloud.

5. A Network That Prioritizes Experience

In its spring 2023 survey of office occupiers, CBRE determined that the average utilization rate of office space in Asia Pacific was 65% and, in North American and Europe, was below 60%. These low office utilization rates are the main reason that the quantity of video traffic on the LAN has exploded. Employees now take videoconferencing capabilities for granted, in their daily interactions with colleagues and with their customers.

The reliance on videoconference puts the spotlight on the network performance. A user of a popular videoconference application can require up to 3.3 Mbps of bandwidth for a meeting with 6 participants and content sharing. As the number of concurrent videoconferences grows, the bandwidth expands accordingly, and network congestion becomes apparent, impeding employees’ ability to communicate effectively. Now that doing business deals over videoconference is a regular occurrence, a dip in video quality can affect a company’s revenues.

To ensure that employees can rely on high-quality videoconferencing, enterprises are adding capacity to their networks, but they are also taking other approaches. IT departments are collecting data from end-user devices, videoconference applications, and the network operations platforms, and using Machine Learning to identify the source of network problems as well as for resolution suggestions. Networking equipment schedulers can also be enhanced to optimize video streams or to improve the performance for certain groups of users, for specific applications, or for special events. Enhancements to support the high bandwidth of today’s video applications will lay the groundwork for the next generation of applications using very high resolution and volumetric video.

Campus Networks Must be Ready to Support Future Applications

An organization’s strategic IT plan will cover the five themes discussed above to varying degrees, depending on the different use cases and priorities. The need to increase bandwidth will be a common element of all the plans.

Although 1 Gbps ports will remain the speed of the majority of campus switch ports shipped over the next few years, we predict the growth of higher-speed ports in the LAN. This push to higher capacity links, shown below, will be driven by the need to connect branch offices at high speeds, by the elevated traffic generated by campus applications, and by the deployment of Wi-Fi 7 APs.

To build an IT strategic plan that will stand the test of time, enterprises must consider that their network traffic patterns will evolve along will their mode of work operations, whether it be mainly work-from-home, hybrid, or fully on-premises. The IEEE has laid a foundation of next generation campus IT functionality to meet the objectives of an organization’s IT plan, such as providing higher visibility into the usage of resources, improving the efficiency of workers, and increasing the sustainability of operations. Underlying all requirements is the need for greater bandwidth to the branch, in the LAN, and directly to end users. By moving to 10 Gbps in the campus, enterprises are taking an important step in readying their network for the future.

Today, Microsoft’s identity and access group made numerous announcements about its Entra product family. The Entra name was introduced a year ago (May-2022) to bring together the long-standing and well-respected Azure Active Directory (AD) franchise with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) solution. While Azure AD kept its name a year ago, today, it was changed. Azure AD is now Microsoft Entra ID. The picture below summarizes the essential products part of today’s announcement.

For me, the critical announcement today was Microsoft’s introduction of its new SSE solution anchored to two new products, Microsoft Entra Internet Access and Microsoft Entra Private Access, and an existing one, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Key takeaways and my opinions on Microsoft entry into the SSE space are:

Microsoft Entra Internet Access (EIA) provides SWG (secure web gateway) functionality.
Microsoft Entra Private Access (EPA) provides ZTNA (zero trust network access) capabilities.
Microsoft EIA is in public preview with limited functionality. It can only protect Microsoft 365 and Windows clients. General traffic protection, cloud firewall, threat protection, and support for other operating systems are slated for later this year.
Microsoft EPA is in public preview. No significant limitations were noted in today’s announcement.
Microsoft went out of its way to remain committed to supporting an open SSE ecosystem.
The naming scheme for Microsoft copies Zscaler’s naming scheme for equivalent products (Zscaler Internet Access [ZIA] and Zscaler Private Access [ZPA]). This is not the first time we have seen a vendor copy Zscaler’s product structure and naming. As they say, if you can’t fight them, join them.
CASB (cloud access security) requires a third Microsoft product, Microsoft Defender for Cloud App.
My SWOT analysis
- Strengths
  - - Unrivaled enterprise presence to facilitate awareness. Everyone knows who Microsoft is and generally enjoys substantial goodwill among its customer base. A large salesforce and partner ecosystem will open many doors.
    - Identity foundation. No other SSE vendor has the same identity vendor chops that Microsoft brings. SSE is identity-heavy, which Microsoft can exploit by owning the identity use cases end-to-end.
    - Azure Cloud. Most SSE vendors partner with cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure to stand up their SSE clouds. Whether cost models or the ability to exploit deeper integrations, the Entra team has a likely advantage.
- Weaknesses
  - - Severely late to market. Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, and Zscaler have a multi-year start over Microsoft. Gaining momentum in a crowded market will take work.
    - No full SASE: SD-WAN still requires a third-party vendor. Single-vendor SASE vendors are gaining market traction.
    - CASB is still a separate product. Unclear how policy sets are defined, but from initial impressions, there will be no policy tie-ins with Microsoft Defender for Cloud App.
- Opportunities
  - - Costing model. Large enterprises that are strong Microsoft shops and take advantage of Microsoft’s Enterprise Licensing Agreement benefits could lead to significant uptake of Microsoft SSE solution.
    - Full SASE: Microsoft has strong networking chops that could facilitate servicing the full SASE opportunity, including networking and security.
- Threats
  - - Microsoft has a history of entering network security markets and then backing away. It tried entering the firewall market in the 2000s, then backed out, leaving customers stranded.
    - Rate of feature richness: Best-of-breed players likely will continue to drive faster innovation and feature richness.

Microsoft has several scheduled analyst briefings over the next month, including one focused on today’s SSE announcement in mid-August. We keenly await to hear more, but until then, please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Spring is time for renewal and we are fresh off some energizing discussions at vendor conferences by HPE Aruba, Juniper, and Extreme Networks. May is a great time to round up some of the major Wireless LAN (WLAN) vendor announcements of the first part of the year. We’re seeing four key themes emerging in manufacturers’ strategies and these trends will have impacts on the WLAN market and its evolution.

AI is everywhere – WLAN is no exception

Artificial Intelligence promises to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, and the intractable problem in WLAN is network management complexity. Enterprise IT teams are struggling to solve bad coverage, interference, and congestion while at the same time, dealing with trouble tickets that are caused by application or WAN-level issues. When user experience is bad, it’s always the Wi-Fi that gets blamed.

Juniper Mist has led the market’s mindshare around AI-Ops and micro-services architectures for enterprise networking. Further enhancements to Mist were announced at Mobility Field Day, with Marvis (Juniper’s virtual assistant) now leveraging the summarization skills of ChatGPT. Juniper has also announced they will be gathering network and user feedback from Zoom’s videoconferencing application which will allow their AI engine to predict the quality of videoconferences that take place in the future.

Meanwhile, HPE has introduced the next generation of Aruba Central in Greenlake, with a whole new solar-system look. In their slick demo at Atmosphere, they highlighted the Time Travel feature that allows the IT team to rewind to the moment of a moment of network degradation and visualize the network metrics at exactly that moment.

High-end AI features tend to arrive first with the public cloud-managed solutions. In 4Q22, only 25% of the world’s units were shipped into public-cloud managed networks, giving them a premium feel and demonstrating that there is room to grow the market. These solutions generate the recurring revenue streams the vendors are chasing, with the added bonus of boosting margins.

AI-Ops is the next frontier of innovation in campus networking and manufacturers are hoping that the savings in enterprises’ IT expenses will be transferred to their bottom line. We are predicting the revenue from these features will continue to grow, and that pubic-managed WLAN solutions will make up over 40% of WLAN manufacturer revenues in 2027.

Wi-Fi 6E expands its foothold

Wi-Fi 6E APs have been slow to take hold in the market (for an explanation as to why this is, see Checking in on enterprise-class Wi-Fi 6E) with vendors such as Extreme, HPE Aruba and Cambium leading the pack in Wi-Fi 6E adoption. However, in the first part of the year, there have been some announcements that will help accelerate 6E take-up.

Commscope Ruckus kicked off the year by announcing a new 2×2 Wi-Fi 6E AP (the R560) aimed at the MDU market. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Arista presented the C330 AP, a 2×2 product that will be available in June. In their Atmosphere conference, HPE pointed to the 615 AP as their affordable 6E option and promised a new 6E AP to come for the hospitality segment. Juniper then introduced the AP24, a lower cost, 2×2 product. Finally, at their conference in Berlin, Extreme Networks revealed the availability of the AP3000, claiming it to be the world’s smallest and greenest Wi-Fi 6E AP.

The introduction of more Wi-Fi 6E 2×2 products will help to bring the average price down, which until now has remained higher than historical precedents set by WLAN technologies. However, we are predicting that the life-cycle of the protocol will be shorter than previous technologies. While some major vendors point out that Wi-Fi 7 standards have not yet been ratified by the IEEE, manufacturers in China are already shipping low volumes of Wi-Fi 7 enterprise-class APs, and Ruckus has revealed that the company is working on a Wi-Fi 7 / cellular combination product. Dell’Oro group is predicting that Wi-Fi 6E shipments will hit their peak in 2024 as the new 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) APs gain traction.

Network Access Control moves to the Cloud

The Network Access Control market is dominated by Cisco ISE and Aruba ClearPass. Last year, Juniper made a move to shore up this leak in its portfolio by acquiring WiteSand, a startup focusing on cloud-native zero-trust Access Control solutions. Arista has made no secrets of its ambitions in enterprise networking sector, and at the end of April, the company announced Agni, its cloud-based NAC, expected in the second quarter. Tellingly, Arista has put effort into ensuring that a customer can easily migrate from an existing NAC system, such as ClearPass. At the end of April, Extreme Networks CEO, Ed Meyercord, let it slip on their earnings call that Extreme would also be “cloudifying” their NAC solution, with an official announcement to come.

The Network Access Control market is small, but these recent vendor announcements demonstrate that placing this function in the cloud is a strategic move to lock up WLAN and campus switching revenues. These are wise choices as we approach what Dell’Oro Group is predicting will be a difficult 2024. We expect campus networking revenues will contract as the market digests the tsunami of orders that have been tangled in backlogs. Vendors will be looking for all the enterprise stickiness they can get.

Campus NaaS broadens its appeal

The Campus NaaS market is emergent and messy, giving ample opportunity for new players to differentiate themselves. We’ve already discussed a framework for the types offers available, showing that new entrants like Shasta Cloud, Meter, Nile, and Ramen Inc have thrown down the gauntlet to incumbents (Dell’Oro Campus NaaS & Public Cloud-Managed LAN Advance Research Report) –but the Camps NaaS market just became even busier.

HPE Aruba announced Agile NaaS at Atmosphere, touting that the standardized NaaS SKUs will enable their MSP partners to sell 75 cents on the dollar of additional services. In Extreme Network’s April earnings call, CEO Ed Meyercord announced investing in R&D to package a solution that will simplify MSPs’ delivery of managed services. Our confidential discussions with several vendors confirm that there is a wide interest in this type of offer, with new announcements on the horizon.

Different service providers mean different things when they sell Campus NaaS; however, one common element is the generation of recurring, high-margin revenues. The size of the dent that new offers will make in the market, and the likelihood they can create new revenue streams, are two market uncertainties that are playing out at this very moment.

With these four key trends in the WLAN industry, manufacturers are increasing both the depth and breadth of their offers, enhancing their technological and commercial appeal. The WLAN industry has seen record growth over the past two years. As we enter a more challenging market environment, manufacturers will need improvements such as these to maintain their customer base while they turn their sites to expand to new markets.

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