Indoor mobile and/or Wi-Fi

5G and Wi-Fi are sometimes seen as competing technologies, however, they offer different benefits and drawbacks and can be deployed in parallel.

As Wi-Fi has been available for many years, it is well embedded in both devices and infrastructure and so can be used by a greater number of devices and at lower cost. Wi-Fi is also relatively quick and simple to deploy as the spectrum is unlicensed and free-to-use, although to prevent widespread interference, the power of Wi-Fi devices is regulated. This means Wi-Fi is more useful for local and private coverage and where seamless handover between Wi-Fi access points isn’t required.

Mobile technologies were initially designed for public wide area use and hence operate at  higher power, using, a different spectrum to manage interference. This spectrum is licensed to operators to provide mobile services.

There is debate about the performance of Wi-Fi versus 5G when it comes to the key metrics of user capacity, data rates and latency. However, these often ignore the key point that both can provide sufficient connectivity, and there needs to be consideration of  many factors that affect actual performance, such as application hosting location (and Edge Computing), network requirements (voice vs data), ease of infrastructure access, and many others.

Most mobile phones and network operators over the past five years now offer Wi-Fi calling capability. This is where the call is passed over the Wi-Fi network rather than mobile connectivity. The phone switches to using Wi-Fi calling when the 4G or 5G signal strength falls below a given threshold, supporting seamless voice calls. On some of the latest phone operating systems there are options to give priority to Wi-Fi calling over mobile, indicating that this is going to be a  growing trend.

If a key requirement is voice calling, you should also consider Wi-Fi calling in your assessment of solutions alongside indoor mobile.

There are technical considerations with Wi-Fi calling depending on the implementation and layout of Wi-Fi access points, including issues with calls being dropped when roaming between access points. If you have a large number of access points deployed, you should take this into consideration when deploying Wi-Fi calling  and investigate solutions to alleviate the issue.

It should also be recognised that mobile technology was designed for seamless handover of voice calls between masts and  Wi-Fi was not. Therefore, dropped calls are more likely when using Wi-Fi networks for voice calling, although the handover between Wi-Fi calling and mobile networks has largely been resolved, at least technically, with VoWiFi (voice-over Wi-Fi) and VoLTE (voice-over-LTE) handover capabilities.