5G cellular to Wi-Fi: Here are the top 10 wireless tech trends for 2019

Wireless technology plays a key role in today's communications and its new forms will become central to emerging technologies including robots, drones, self-driving vehicles and new medical devices over the next five years, a new report by Gartner Inc. said on Tuesday.

The market research firm identified the top 10 wireless technology trends for enterprise architecture (EA) and technology innovation leaders.

"Business and IT leaders need to be aware of these technologies and trends now. Many areas of wireless innovation will involve immature technologies, such as 5G and millimeter wave, and may require skills that organisations currently don't possess.

"EA and technology innovation leaders seeking to drive innovation and technology transformation should identify and pilot innovative and emerging wireless technologies to determine their potential and create an adoption roadmap," Nick Jones, Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement.

According to the market research firm, Wi-Fi has been around a long time and will remain the primary high-performance networking technology for homes and offices till 2024. Beyond simple communications, Wi-Fi will find new roles -- for example, in radar systems or as a component in two-factor authentication systems.

5G cellular systems are starting to be deployed in 2019 and 2020. The complete rollout will take five to eight years.

"5G is still immature, and initially, most network operators will focus on selling high-speed broadband. However, the 5G standard is evolving and future iterations will improve 5G in areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and low-latency applications," Jones added.

Both conventional and self-driving cars will need to communicate with each other, as well as with road infrastructure. This will be enabled by V2X wireless systems. In addition to exchanging information and status data, V2X can provide a multitude of other services, such as safety capabilities, navigation support and infotainment.

The other wireless technology trends identified by the market research firm include, long-range wireless power, low-power wide-area (LPWA) Networks, wireless sensing, enhanced wireless location tracking, millimeter wave wireless, backscatter networking and software-defined radio (SDR).