Growing market pressure, due to the rapid adoption of mobile and connected devices across the globe, has been compelling the telecommunications developers to come up with advanced specifications, technologies and solutions. The establishment of new standards is going to boost Wi-Fi as a promising technology of the future, suggests some new findings.

ABI Research (News - Alert), a research and analysis firm that focuses on assessing the trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies, has announced through its ‘Small Cells and Carrier Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Research Services’ that equipped with new global standards, the Wi-Fi technology is soon going to boom within the telecommunications market during the coming years.

The new findings have been supported by ABI Research’s competitive analyses, vendor matrices, market data and market insights as well. Some years back, the mobile operators worldwide had showed disinterest in adopting Wi-Fi due to a number of reasons. Now, the research firm says, together the Wi-Fi Alliance (News - Alert), the Wireless Broadband Alliance and the GSM Association have jointly been emphasizing the establishment of standard specifications such as Hotspot 2.0 and Next Generation Hotspot that have specifically been developed to address the needs of carrier integrated Wi-Fi, so that wireless carriers can integrally include Wi-Fi within the reach of their networks.

Further, ABI Research says, the GSMA (News - Alert) and WBA have been integrating Access Network Discovery and Selection Function, a standard laid out by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, right into the NGH. It will develop a framework that will considerably affect the importance of Wi-Fi within the cellular networks.

“Successful and speedy implementation of ANDSF in NGH is critical to the growth of Carrier Wi-Fi,” commented Nick Marshall, principal analyst, mobile networks. “There are many challenges to be overcome for an operator when considering deploying Wi-Fi as an off-load mechanism with operator enthusiasm for and acceptance of Wi-Fi not yet a given.”

According to the research firm, a lack of uniform standards badly affected the wide scale market adoption of Wi-Fi; and assumes that after the new standards are introduced, the sales of carrier Wi-Fi equipment will rise from around 650 thousand access points in the year 2012 to almost 6.8 million in the year 2017. A number of aspects such as the availability of suitable backhaul, availability of electrical power at the installation sites and ease of installation, operator acceptance of Wi-Fi and the overall effectiveness of network management systems in controlling very large networks of Wi-Fi access points will play a vital role in boosting this growth, ABI Research emphasizes.

In May 2012, ABI Research announced that the overall number of shipments of core home networking equipment such as home gateways/routers, adapters, bridges, NICs, embedded LAN, NAS and networked-enabled media devices such as CE devices with network connectivity, excluding computers and mobile devices, will exceed one billion units by the year 2014.

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