Wi-Fi Alliance Announces Improvements to Home Wi-Fi

The Wi-Fi Alliance has recently announced new features to Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Easy Connect and Wi-Fi CERTIFIED EasyMesh, with the aim to provide secure, smart, efficient home networks, particularly with the increase in home-working and home-learning associated with COVID-19. Wi-Fi Easy Connect helps to simplify the addition of new Wi-Fi devices, such as smart lightbulbs, doorbells, or smoke detectors, that lack or have a limited display interface, to home or enterprise Wi-Fi networks, ensuring that they support advanced WPA3 security. Wi-Fi EasyMesh networks utilize multiple APs that connect to provide a unified mesh network, offering smart, high-performance connectivity throughout an entire home, improving capacity, lowering latency, and offering advanced features such as simultaneous services and applications.

The new features for the two programs are designed to benefit both users and service providers, with home networks having the ability to be smarter, interoperable, secure, easy to set up, flexible, and provide high quality Wi-Fi. Homes with these programs are expected to see networks continually progress and become more advanced to meet the growing number of devices and services. Having a network that is easy to set up, manage, and secure will help to improve the connected home. Companies such as ASSIA, CableLabs, CommScope, MediaTek, and Qualcomm have supported the development of these new features, allowing their offerings to be improved. The new features available for the programs include:

• Wi-Fi Easy Connect: New features help to provide a simple, flexible network authentication and onboarding process, offering two new methods alongside the QR code scanning process—no-touch cloud-based technology and NFC tag scanning. This provides easy and secure network access while ensuring that all devices utilize the latest security protocols and public-key cryptography, are configured automatically when changing network settings or changing the SSID, and are managed individually.
• Wi-Fi EasyMesh: New features include additions to increase network capacity and provide support for simultaneous services and service prioritization. These features help to improve low latency applications, ensuring that applications such as real-time, interactive video displays are not impacted by lesser applications with a lower time-sensitive priority. It also offers improved diagnostics, supporting Wi-Fi Data Elements and enabling service providers to instantaneously identify and resolve issues with the network. Wi-Fi EasyMesh can also utilize Wi-Fi Easy Connect, offering easy onboarding of new APs, allowing home network coverage to be expanded as and when required.

COVID-19 has caused a surge in home Wi-Fi data traffic, with large numbers of people working, learning, and generally spending more time at home, connecting a greater number of devices simultaneously to the network. This has led to home networks struggling to support this increasing use, with many providers and other companies looking for ways in which to improve and harden their offerings. Programs such as EasyMesh in particular have the ability to support this increasing number of devices, particularly in homes where people, and therefore the devices, are spread across all rooms, ensuring that all corners have access to the required high-speed connectivity. Alongside this, programs such as Easy Connect are improving the onboarding process of new connected devices and APs within the home by consumers, particularly where people are spending more time at home and purchasing a greater number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices.

The COVID-19 pandemic will also likely cause a long-term impact on networks, with a greater number of companies investigating the potential of continuing with the work-from-home option. This will lead to the continuing requirement for networks to support large numbers of devices simultaneously across all parts of the home.

Companies across the Wi-Fi market need to be aware of the increasing pressure on home Wi-Fi networks and ensure that they are investigating solutions that will improve these networks and provide high-quality, high-speed connectivity on an easy-to-manage network. This will enhance network offerings and device connectivity, improving the overall customer experience, and allow the company to remain competitive, increasing customer retention and new customer onboarding.