Nokia Thursday expanded its private wireless portfolio with the ‘Nokia DAC Wi-Fi’ industrial-grade solution, which the company said can be used to tap into license-free spectrum.

The Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) Wi-Fi solution will be available in the fourth quarter of 2022 and will cater to the varied needs of industries, as per an official statement.

Enterprises have been using 4.9G/LTE and 5G for their connectivity needs, as well as Wi-Fi. But now many are upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 to improve capabilities for connected legacy assets and services.

With the Nokia DAC Wi-Fi solution, organizations can tap into license-free spectrum to augment their private networks and support non-business-critical Operational Technology (OT) workflows, such as deskless workforce instructions and non-critical connections used to access machine maintenance data, the statement added.

Organizations can also take advantage of the Nokia DAC single cloud-based operations and management interface for all connectivity technologies, add plug and play private wireless 4.9G/LTE and 5G for real-time reliable connectivity, or boost capacity with Wi-Fi 6 for other connectivity needs.

“By introducing the Nokia DAC Wi-Fi connectivity solution to our portfolio, we broaden our support for connecting machines, sensors and people to accelerate our clients’ Industry 4.0 journey,” said Stephan Litjens, Vice President of Enterprise solutions for Nokia.

“Private wireless is likely to dominate OT critical connectivity needs over time, but Wi-Fi is likely to remain part of the connectivity mix used in industrial plants for a long time to come. The recent evolution to Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, that helps makes Wi-Fi more deterministic, also makes it more suitable for less critical high bandwidth OT applications,” said Michele Mackenzie, Principal Analyst, Analysys Mason.

Additionally, the company also launched the ‘MX Boost’ solution for private wireless which can combine various radio technologies such as Wi-Fi and 4.9G/LTE to improve reliability for Industry 4.0 use cases.

As part of this new offering, the MX Boost routing functions will be made available as an application running on Nokia MX Industrial Edge and will launch new field routers as part of a new range of industrial devices that also support the new MX Boost capabilities, as per a separate statement by Nokia.

“MX Boost can aggregate and integrate those layers to super-charge performance and reliability. It operates over any Wi-Fi network, as well as with the new Nokia DAC Wi-Fi, to allow companies the greatest choice in the way they support their digital transformation,” added Litjens.