The Beacon

Wi-Fi® is the foundation of IoT’s golden age

March 14, 2023
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The Beacon

Wi-Fi Alliance® was thrilled to welcome Ross Sabolcik, SVP and GM for Commercial and Industrial IoT Products at Silicon Labs, to The Signal podcast. Ross joined the show to discuss how Wi-Fi 6, Matter, and consumer demand have driven the development of the IoT landscape, throttling the technology into a golden age of connectivity.

“I think there's a lot of interesting things happening both around the Wi-Fi standard and some of the ecosystems that are built on top of Wi-Fi®,” Ross said. “If you look at IoT applications, Wi-Fi 6 is going to bring a lot of benefits.” Ross spoke about how Wi-Fi 6 offers enhanced efficiency through its unique feature set, including the ability to support more nodes and higher bandwidth applications while also delivering maximized battery life due to its Target Wake Time capability.

Ross also noted that Wi-Fi 6 has solved many of the challenges that were once presented when attempting to onboard multiple IoT devices to a network. “Adding a lot of devices to a Wi-Fi network has had some challenges in the past, and with IoT networks, the number of devices could be an order of magnitude more than you would have in a lot of traditional Wi-Fi applications. So, having the ability to scale, and the ability to do it in a low-power way, is really important in IoT. Wi-Fi 6 brings a lot to the table to address all of those IoT needs.”

From home security cameras to factory monitoring, IoT applications span a multitude of verticals, and Wi-Fi continues to support them all. “There could be several different reasons why you'd want to choose Wi-Fi,” Ross said. “One of the important ones is Wi-Fi is very ubiquitous – you assume that in an environment, Wi-Fi connectivity is going to be there.”

New IoT uses cases arise every day, and Wi-Fi has allowed users to feel confident that they’ll remain connected. Click here to listen to our full conversation with Ross, and check back for more updates as we delve into the evolution of Wi-Fi in IoT.

Listen to Episode 32: Wi-Fi is enabling a golden age of IoT with Ross Sabolcik of Silicon Labs

The statements and opinions by each Wi-Fi Alliance member and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions or views of Wi-Fi Alliance or any other member. Wi-Fi Alliance is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information provided by any member in posting to or commenting on this blog. Concerns should be directed to info@wi-fi.org.

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