¿Wi-Fi 6 VS 5G?

As of other trending technologies always happen that there another ones emerging in parallel, some times with several similitude causing confusion in terms or context.

The digital era and all this quantity of devices and things connecting to the infrastructure has brought as consequence the evolution of access technologies. Such as Wi-Fi and Cellular.

It is very evident that concepts like BYOD and IoT consider not only the aspect to care about coverage but also facing the situation of attending big amounts of devices en specific areas (Coverage & Capacity).

Talking about Wi-FI, the latest generation offers more speed and support for more devices. For now let´s get aside technical stuff explaining how Wi-Fi 6 achieves this (OFDMA, QAM-1024, MU-MIMO, TWT, BSS COLORING, etc.)

By another hand, the fifth generation of cellular technology has focused similarly on increasing speed and creating cells of coverage which offer the correct capacity. Coincidentally in 5G OFDMA, Channel Bonding, MU-MIMO are used too, obviously with their own specs.

As you can see, both technologies (Wi-Fi 6 & 5G) are committed to offer better experience to the end user and better performance for their devices.

Not only the increase of devices triggered those accelerated changes on both technologies but also the increase of services and applications "traveling" through these data networks. Diverse services, from enterprise collaboration up to entertainment passing across these communication media create a high demand to face local services and in the cloud.

Each technology has to be properly used. Understand the customer requirements for each project is always the key component to deploy correctly. It is for sure there are different aspects during the deployment of infrastructure to care more about than other but there is a common factor to evaluate; cost versus benefit, definitely between both technologies exist a huge gap on this aspect (price). Besides the timeline for adopting a technology and the necessary time for having client devices supporting the new technologies.

Each technology cover very specific requirements. In the case of Wi-Fi it´s for sure it will continue being the chosen access solution for corporate networks for indoor use and some other use cases for outdoor. For 5G depending on the adoption will be used for particular IoT scenarios where Wi-Fi won´t cover specific requirements for outdoor solutions as an example. A very particular use case is for roaming, for example scenarios like traveling in a car, high speed trains or any other transport of its kind where it is very notorious despite of 802.11 amendments like k,v,r transition results obtained in cellular networks exceed these.

The truth is we can´t consider a "versus" between these two technologies, by the contrary, we will see how they complement each other to cover different needs and purposes where the common factor is "Connecting more devices and offer more performance through a wireless medium".