The indoor problem does not get cheaper
High-band 5G does not go through buildings, and new base stations are expensive and hard to site
Most of the traffic is indoors, most of the complaints are indoors, and the conventional fix — more macro and small cells — has the worst cost curve of anything on the roadmap. Meanwhile a Wi-Fi network is already in every building you are trying to cover, and it is usually somebody else's.
The question is not whether to use Wi-Fi. It is whether Wi-Fi behaves like part of your network — same SIM authentication, same policy, same charging, same handover — or like a public hotspot your subscribers have to think about.
Where to start
Four solutions that matter most in a mobile network
SD-WiFiCarrier Wi-Fi offloadEAP-SIM/AKA against your AAA, HSS/HLR and PCRF; SoftGRE/EtherIP wireless access gateway; 3GPP-compliant ePDG for VoWiFi; Passpoint with silent onboarding.OpenWiFi · Dual-Image APOpen stack without the betThe same access point runs IDL's carrier firmware or a TIP OpenWiFi image. Answer an open-standards tender without giving up the carrier feature set.AIOpsOperations at national scaleA network that explains its own faults instead of handing your NOC another dashboard. Necessary once the AP count passes what humans can watch.IoT ConvergenceOne site install, two networksLoRaWAN, BLE and UWB radios in the same access point, so an IoT rollout does not need its own site survey, its own mounting and its own truck.
Proven where it counts
This is not a reference design
400,000+access points deployed across the Capital area of a Tier-1 operator in East Asia
100M+subscribers on the operator running one of the world's largest integrated Wi-Fi and cellular systems
100+granted invention patents, including more than 30 PCT international filings
What you would be deploying
Technical reading
- SD-WiFi white paper — carrier offload architecture
- AIOps white paper
- Passpoint technical white paper
- Large-scale networking white paper
Products
- SKG10000 — carrier multi-service gateway
- IAC700E / IAC700B — WLAN controllers
- CloudOS — controller on x86 or cloud
- IAP7094 / IAP7036 — Wi-Fi 7 access points
- NMP — cloud management and analytics
Evaluating Wi-Fi as part of the RAN?
Architecture notes, integration references against real core networks and evaluation hardware are available on request.
Talk to our team