To Wi-Fi or not to Wi-Fi ?

Last few years have seen the journey of Mobile Cellular Networks (MCNs) from the simple GSM/GPRS to 5G (yet to be commercialized). Having done research on not so hyped but good old Wi-Fi for 7 years now I have started wondering was it worth ? My research pertains to guaranteed bandwidth demand provisioning in Wi-Fi mesh networks (WMNs). My research is about creating city wide Wi-Fi mesh networks with speed as good as the wired network. I found that city wide WMNs could guarantee the required bandwidth by judicious applying my proposed load management scheme. In a layman's term my research successfully converts a whole city as a Wi-Fi hot spot at a very low installation, operation and maintenance cost. This I could achieve by taking the help of the already existing power line. This way no additional wires need to be laid out as power line is available everywhere. My research is especially useful for developing countries like India where rural area do not have any wired infrastructure except for the power line. Having completed my research I wanted to publish it in various journals. I was surprised to get weird comments from reputed journals when I submitted my papers. Most of them can be summarized as "Research on Wi-Fi has become obsolete", "No one is interested in this topic" etc.

This was the time to  face hard facts and rethink on why this technology is not needed anymore? Little more observations on current research trends brought out many surprising facts. My first question was - If Wi-Fi is not the interest of today's research then what is ? the answer I got was the very expensive Mobile network and  its much fancied upgrades like 3G, 4G, 5G and so on. I saw millions of dollars being pumped into these technologies by huge corporate. So the first hard fact was

• In this case Academia is no more driving the industry but now its industry which is driving the academia.

Now let us analyse this fact more. Any university will always be supporting a corporate funded project as it fetches good economic returns. If a university is faced with option of supporting a non funded Wi-Fi project or a funded 4G/5G project it will definitely opt for the funded one. Same logic goes with the other research organisations and academic publications as well.

• Why is industry creating hype around all these various G's ?

Since my research I have been asking following question to each and every person I meet

• Which option is cheaper 
• Option I : Using your smart phone without SIM and surf the net using Wi-Fi and talk through Skype
• Option II : Using your SIM for talking and 4G for surfing the net

Every single person opted for the option I as cheaper and better alternative. So now you get the answer Wi-Fi is a major threat to the Mobile Service Providers (MSP). 

Those who are well versed with the history of the Internet can say here that "History repeats itself". An analogy can be derived from the TCP/IP replacing its better alternative the ISO/OSI model due to the corporate lobbying. No MSP will like to see a city wide Wi-Fi mesh network which can convert a whole city to a Hot Spot. Also no MSP will like to see a smart phone without a SIM card !!! Why ?

The millions of dollars which are already pumped in to the Mobile network infrastructure (including the mobile towers) will go totally waste.

The solution is to create a hype around these 'G' technologies. As a result, even before 2G could see light of the day there was 3G in the pipeline and now lo ! there is 5G already in conceptual stage when 4G and 4G LTE are just being rolled out. Can you imagine the amount of money which going down the drain just because of these efforts to not only push this expensive technology more and more but also create unnecessary hype around it so as to throttle a more efficient and cheaper alternative. Of course the corporate need not worry about the money part because we the customers are always there to fleece out. The surprising factor is that even the academia has been fooled into this and are getting carried away in this flow. 

The cost of all the 3G,4G,4GLTE, VOLTE and finally 5G adventures are finally going to be paid up from our pockets

• Let us all rise together for a SIM free and MSP free era which will liberate us from the expensive MSP bills 

Money matters for corporate but it cannot be everything. We the customers are the ones who finally get cheated in this whole scam. Its time when the MSPs have to be shown the door. It is a proven fact that Wi-Fi offers a better and higher bandwidth as compared to all these G's put together. No matter how much technology be pumped into this it can never match the speed and efficiency of the simple Wi-Fi. The main reason for this being the huge delays being incurred in the process of overlaying one Wide Area Network (WAN) over another WAN. First of all why do we have to force one WAN on another when we can manage well with only one which is the Internet. Do you know the number of times the mobile data is compressed/decompressed and encapsulated/stripped of its header and footer by the time it reaches the destination? It is forced to go through a series of patchwork of networks comprising of the end user, to base station , to MSP to Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) network before it reaches its destination.This is the very reason why the voice quality goes bad many times and also the browsing speed goes very slow especially in case of overseas calls because they go through the sub sea cable conversion also. For deeper technical insight into the inefficiencies of the current mobile network one can refer the October 2014 IEEE Spectrum magazine article available at link http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-mobile-voice-quality-still-stinksand-how-to-fix-it . One can ignore the 'how to fix it' part in the article as it suggests VOLTE and 4G in many places as the eventual solution which we all know is going to cost us a lot.

Note : Using Wi-Fi to offload 4G LTE data is again foolishness of highest level. It implies you move out of one WAN to another WAN only to get back to the original WAN. One can imagine the amount of delay incurred in the packet conversion process to achieve the compatibility.