High-Density and De-Densified Smart Campus Communications

10The Age of Wi‐Fi and Rise of the Wireless SuperNetwork (WiSNET)

The previous chapters discussed several key technical building blocks of a modern network. There is, in fact, an end‐user expectation for a transparent, easy‐to‐use, service‐oriented, multimedia‐based secure network that transcends locality and navigates along wherever the user is, sojourns, or transits. However, it is still rare to find all the elements discussed earlier in this text being efficiently integrated into one cohesive technical, service, and administrative platform, if at all, and it is practically impossible to meet all or the majority of the simple service criteria just cited.

Yet, the opportunity now exists to go beyond a mere assemblage of disparate technologies into a complex network, but to a denouement, to a state where the network is endogenously architected on a dynamically elastic infrastructure that is based on one fundamental building block to support all services in an elemental but scalable manner: Wi‐Fi technology. It turns out that, indeed, Wi‐Fi technology allows one to build and deploy a new generation multitier network, a Wireless SuperNetwork (WiSNET), that delivers all the service desiderata, yet is easy to use, service‐rich, cost‐effective, easy to maintain and administer, scalable, and secure.

At press time, the Wi‐Fi ecosystem was already valued at $3 trillion, and it was expected to reach $4 trillion by 2023 (that equates to an intrinsic value of more than $500 for every ...