Going Wireless with 5G and Wi-Fi 6: Next Generation Solutions for Enterprise, Retail, and Light Industrial

3G is on the way out. 4G is here today and 4G is also here to stay. We believe that 4G has a lifetime of at least another decade, possibly more. And it's actually a great technology for IoT use cases today. And for use cases that do not need the speed, the latency, etc., that 5G provides.

4G is also often more cost-effective. For example, when you think about distance learning, a high-end 5G device might not be the right solution yet. It might be for if you need to aggregate multiple students, but you probably won't give each student a 5G device. 4G is still great for those use cases. But one thing to note as well is that as 5G evolves, there is technology on the horizon that eventually will also serve these lower speed applications, these IoT applications from the 5G ecosystem.

Yes. We connect to both Azure and AWS. So, we love both. We had to pick one and so we're hosting on Amazon today.

That's a great question. So, for the rest of the audience, satellite technology has been around for a while, and it is geostationary or GEO satellites that are a little bit higher up away from the Earth. Because they're higher up, and because they're older, they cannot provide the speed and they cannot provide the low latency that, either a wired or a cellular-based solution can provide.

There are newer systems that are coming online. SpaceX's Starlink is one example, there's Amazon Kuiper, there's a few others that are coming online that are low earth orbit, or LEO satellites. And these satellites are zipping around the Earth, you need a lot of them, but they can provide higher speeds.

Looking forward, where you don't have other options such as cellular or fiber, these new satellite systems are also a great solution if you're out in the middle of nowhere, for example on a farm, or really out in the middle of nowhere and you need to have connectivity.

Now with that said, Starlink is targeting broadband connectivity. You might use their service for backhaul, have a private mobile network for local distribution, and your 4G or 5G devices like Digi EX50 5G with Wi-Fi 6 to service your area that you want to service. It's definitely a great technology. And I'm really excited about what's going on, on satellite space as well.

Great question. There are a couple things. For one, WPA3 is kind of the next iteration of wireless security, further strengthening the key exchange and the security there. But what's almost more exciting to me is that Wi-Fi 6 now also provides encryption for open networks, such as in a coffee shop. Prior to Wi-Fi 6 and prior to WPA3, the connection between your device and that Wi-Fi access point was unencrypted and anyone with a regular network sniffer could see the data traffic.

Yes, they can. You can do that with VRRP for example. One other thing you can do is you can also daisy chain multiple EX50s. And if you have either on the same carrier or on multiple carriers or multiple network operators, you know, you can aggregate bandwidth that way. And also add redundancy as well.

It is 3GPP release 15 today. And for those who don't know what I'm talking about, so 3GPP defines the cellular standards and such. And it's all these standards that come together to deliver in the end the cellular network. There's many releases or iterations of that. Release 15 was the first milestone release that introduced 5G.

And you know, every year, year and a half, two years, they come out with a new incremental release, such as 5G for these lower speed devices that I mentioned earlier. And then, usually once a decade, there is a larger release that then introduces a new generation, like the transition from 4G to 5G, and of course, eventually, right now our target is 2030 roughly we'll see 6G.

No, the AP in the Digi EX50 is not controller-based. It works independently, but you can manage a collection of EX50’s remotely from Digi Remote Manager.

That's a good question. I have not done the math. And I would say my answer is it depends. It depends on the resolution of the camera; it depends on the encoding of the data stream. And the codec that is being used. It's a good question. I don't know. Gut feel is a dozen, possibly more.

And of course, it also depends on the amount of uplink speed that you have available. Cameras are uplink heavy unless you do some kind of a local edge compute either on the device or on an edge server that is connected, to reduce the amount of data that needs to be streamed upstream.

Digi Remote Manager is a cloud application, and so it's securely hosted in AWS. Depending on the size of the installation, we're also open to hosting a private instance. But we do not have an on-prem solution today. But most customers, honestly, when you look at how the data flows, and you know, where the applications are these days, many of them are already in the cloud.

So, having a cloud-based system that is accessible securely from anywhere, is usually the preferred way that customers use today. There are some market segments that prefer to air gap, so we understand that, and we have a solution to that as well. Reach out to us.

It's a very good question that I cannot comment on publicly.