What are the benefits of 4G WiFi?

More and more businesses are beginning to utilise 4G LTE WiFi instead of traditional, fixed line broadband.

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What is 4G WiFi?

As you might have already guessed, 4G WiFi is an alternative to fixed-line broadband that uses the UK’s 4G cellular data network to connect your devices to the internet.

Our 4G solution uses a specially designed, industrial grade 4G router to provide broadband connectivity for up to 25 staff. Businesses that need more device connections can have multiple routers.

What are the benefits of 4G WiFi?

Using a 4G connection instead of a fixed line has a whole host of benefits, including portability, flexibility and lower roll out times.

Portability

Arguably the main benefit of 4G WiFi is its portability. The beauty of a small, compact 4G router is that you can take it anywhere. So if you’re on the move, your WiFi can come with you. This is ideal for industries such as railway workers, who move along the line as they go.

Flexibility

4G WiFi is also incredibly flexible. It can be used in a wide variety of situations by all different types of business. From disaster recovery to construction, home working and more. Because of the aforementioned portability of 4G WiFi, it is not tied down to any specific geographic region. This means that it can quickly and easily adapt to any environment.

Rollout Speed

Traditional fixed line broadband has a lead time of around 10-14 days. This means that it often takes two weeks to get a full broadband set up complete. But this is not the case with 4G WiFi. Because the solution requires no line provisioning or rollout, it can be dispatched in as little as 24 hours, fully set up and ready to go.

Cost saving

Saving money is always an important part of business. We know that keeping costs down is important. Because it doesn’t have long 24 month contract periods, our 4G WiFi solution is a very cost effective option.

Who might use 4G WiFi?

You might think that a 4G WiFi solution isn’t the right solution for your business. But you’d be surprised. There are so many different applications of 4G WiFi including:

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Construction

4G WiFi is ideal for construction sites. With short lead times, great portability and no geographic restrictions, our 4G WiFi solutions is perfect for construction sites. In fact it’s so perfect that it’s in use in the UK’s largest construction site.

Disaster Recovery

Losing broadband connectivity is a very big issue for businesses. The last thing any business needs is a broadband outage, which often leads to loss in productivity and even a missing out on potential business. Implementing a 4G disaster recovery solution allows your business to continue as normal, even if your broadband is down.

Remote workers

Working from home or remote working is another use of 4G WiFi. Businesses may wish to issue staff with their own 4G router, which they can use to connect to the internet while they’re working away from the office.

Last week, we discussed “What to look for in a 4G router” and the first question we asked ourselves was related to the “use-cases”. This week we will dive deeper into the various use cases of LTE or 5G routers and LTE or 5G modems.

LTE modems and LTE routers (sometimes known as “MiFi“ for some of the lower-end personal LTE routers), and the upcoming 5G versions, are an evolution of the cellular connectivity that normally provides Internet access to your mobile phone. So, historically, LTE routers and also 2G and 3G modems have a use case for individual connectivity needs. The specific use cases can be vast and since these applications usually do not require the performance and feature set of advanced LTE routers, we will leave that set of personal use cases for later.

LTE connection speeds with the new category versions rapidly being deployed, have come a long way and are now capable of providing connectivity speeds that are impressive. Because of that, they are becoming a connectivity option for enterprise branch offices. Whether in the retail, healthcare, food or financial sectors, the LTE router is used as the edge WAN device for the enterprise branch. There might be various reasons for using an LTE or 5G router as the permanent and primary Internet connectivity for a small or mid-sized branch, although lack of wired connectivity options is the most common.

For scenarios where the LTE router will be used as a temporary Internet connectivity solutions, the use-case might be related to the time sensitivity of the network activation. It is fairly, common to have install lead times as high as several months (compared to the same day for an LTE or 5G router) and in the fast-paced business world we live in, those types of high lead times are not acceptable. An advanced LTE router with built-in firewall, QoS and traffic management capabilities will provide the much needed connectivity to the cloud for a new pop-up retail store.

Similarly, kiosks can be connected to the cloud and the backend systems of the business via LTE routers. Kiosks by definition will be portable or in locations where wired Internet connectivity might be problematic to provision.

The ultimate mobility of course is with vehicles, where Internet connectivity can easily be provided by LTE routers. The vehicles may be part of a specialty vehicle fleet where the internet is needed for various systems or applications running the vehicle, such as security cameras or telemetry data. Or perhaps the vehicles are part of a mass transportation system, such as buses or trains. For these vehicles, LTE routers can provide Internet connectivity for the passengers in the form of WiFi. Some other vehicular use cases include mobile clinics, bus libraries, first responders, law enforcement and others.

We are about to unleash the real power of connected machines. Sometimes called IoT (Internet of Things) or Machine to Machine (M2M), with the reduction of connectivity cost, virtually any thing can afford to be connected to the cloud. The application can vary from tracking parts, to monitoring crops to managing your home electronics remotely over the Internet. In any of these applications, either for the “thing” itself, or as a gateway for the collection of “things”, LTE routers can be a good and sometimes the only alternative.

Of course, we assumed in all of the use cases described so far, that the LTE router is providing the primary connectivity. In some scenarios, however, the LTE modem may provide a failover network, instead of a primary network. The advanced LTE routers are capable of having wired WAN, as well as two or more LTE connections and intelligently combining them to create networks with 4G automated failover. Check out, for example, the Broadband Bonding LTE routers here.

In some cases, the deployment requires a physically segregated network from the primary network and therefore a separate router may work better, which we call the secondary network use case.

Whatever your use case might be, we recommend broadband bonding LTE routers with advanced routing, firewalling, traffic shaping, layer 7 filtering, quality of service and bandwidth reservations.

Cahit Akin, CEO, Mushroom Networks, Inc. 

Mushroom Networks is the provider of SD-WAN (Software Defined WAN) and NFV solutions capable of Broadband Bonding that enables self-healing WAN networks that route around network problems such as latency, jitter and packet loss.

https://www.mushroomnetworks.com

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