• Cisco wireless CTO Matt McPherson said Wi-Fi and 5G are complementary, with Wi-Fi's traffic lead widening even as 5G remains "strategically important to digitizing a country"
• McPherson said AI is driving always-on connectivity demand beyond office workers to skilled trades like healthcare and construction
• Cisco backed OpenRoaming and its new Cloud Control platform to ease "Portal Pain" and help lean IT teams manage denser networks

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Should the toilet paper hang over or under the roll?

Which is better — Wi-Fi or 5G?

These are arguments that go on perpetually. 

But Matt McPherson, Cisco wireless CTO, has the answer on the third question:

Neither. They coexist.

"If you went back a few years, you had one camp saying that their stack was going to take over everything. What we're seeing is that's not actually happening." Wi-Fi traffic volume is increasing more rapidly than 5G, McPherson said. "That gap is widening, not shrinking."

"Where do people deploy Wi-Fi?" he said. "They deploy it where work happens, where play happens, where education happens. Those hot spots carry the bulk of the traffic," McPherson said.

On the other hand, 5G has capabilities that are unavailable in WI-Fi, said the Cisco executive. 5G delivers multi-kilometer range, which Wi-Fi does not do.

"In Wi-Fi, we're never going to be able to solve driving 80 miles an hour down the road, and doing handoff tower to tower. We're never going to have the coverage and the power that a licensed network can do. So I want to be very clear: 5G is strategically important to digitizing a country," McPherson said.

The winning strategy is for Wi-Fi and 5G to complement each other, McPherson said. Wi-Fi carries the traffic; 5G covers the miles.

A distributed antenna system (DAS) provides 5G connectivity indoors, but bearer traffic typically goes through Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi provides more spectrum — 100 MHz for 5G vs. nearly 2,000 MHz for Wi-Fi across its bands. "Wi-Fi will always, always be capable of carrying orders of magnitude more traffic than 5G. But Wi-Fi would not give you ubiquitous coverage. We want to leverage these two technologies and their strengths," McPherson said.

Cisco supports technologies such as OpenRoaming, intelligent path selection and mobility between indoors and outdoors to bring Wi-Fi and 5G together, McPherson said.

"Wi-Fi is a cost-effective densification strategy for 5G. Wi-Fi and 5G are friends. They are not opposed," he said.

The principle is illustrated in this 2002 revival of a classic Broadway musical.

I sat down with McPherson and his colleague Chris O'Rourke, VP of engineering at Cisco Wireless, for a wide-ranging conversation at the Cisco Live conference last month, where we discussed how AI alters the Wi-Fi requirements, how Wi-Fi stress-tests network management, and how to relieve "portal pain." It all started with a question that I thought was frivolous but that turned out to be significant (and the question had nothing to do with hot dogs or toilet paper).

How AI changes Wi-Fi demand

AI increases wireless connectivity demand, McPherson said. "Because of AI, people have a requirement to be on the network more of the time." That's particularly true of skilled trades, such as construction and healthcare. Those workers are using AI more and more to improve productivity, which is driving up utilization and the need for always-on connectivity.

Always-on connectivity was previously required mainly by office workers (also known as "email jobs" ). Skilled trades, such as construction and healthcare, only needed to be online sporadically, to check in; they did their actual work disconnected, with their hands. AI is changing that dynamic.

For example, in healthcare, nurses administering drugs have historically worked in pairs, with a second nurse looking over the first nurse's shoulder to prevent mistakes. Now, nurses are using cameras with integrated AI to allow the observing nurse to work remotely, McPherson said.

Drones continuously inspect buildings under construction to ensure regulatory and design compliance. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) move loads around in factories and fulfillment centers and deliver linens in hospitals and hotels. AGVs require Wi-Fi connectivity to support video streaming for quality control and to receive instructions, said O'Rourke said.

The state of wireless

Managing wireless networks is becoming increasingly challenging for enterprises, according to a survey of more than 6,000 network managers, mostly in the enterprise, in Cisco's State of Wireless 2026 research. My colleague Monica Alleven wrote about the report when it debuted in early April, with her article focusing on wireless security risks and talent shortages.

About half of respondents to the survey were American and European and half were Asian. Respondents were not limited to Cisco customers, and the survey was double-blind, so respondents did not know Cisco was asking the questions.

More than 80% of respondents said they spend more time reacting to trouble tickets, McPherson said. Network connectivity is becoming more important and network density is increasing.

"The macro forces working on wireless in the last few years have been an increase in expectations. It's gone from nicety to necessity in more and more industries. Wireless downtime is a business-stopper," O'Rourke said.

"And the skills of the operator are also trending down," he added.

Wait, what? Is O'Rourke saying network management teams are getting dumber?

No, that's not what O'Rourke is saying. "We see more and more customers going with leaner IT teams. Leaner IT means less time and energy per access point," he said.

"Demands on the network are going up, expectations are going up, staffing is going down and so that's a perfect storm," O'Rourke said. "AI fills that gap very well."

The industry moved beyond CLI long ago and now is moving past web UIs. The new standard user interface for network operations is conversation with AI assistants, O'Rourke said.

That philosophy drives Cisco Cloud Control, introduced at the Cisco Live conference last month, which provides a unified platform for humans and AI agents to manage and secure critical infrastructure. The platform pulls in telemetry to provide a complete view of the network to diagnose problems over Wi-Fi, SD-WAN and switching, find the root cause of network problems and often resolve them before users complain.

Relieving 'Portal Pain'

My meeting with McPherson and O'Rourke was a result of my whining to a Cisco spokesperson at Cisco Live about a first-world problem: I was wrapping up a heavy run of conference travel, and I was annoyed at the need to manually connect to Wi-Fi in airports, hotels, conference centers and on planes.

With Wi-Fi, I need to choose which network to connect to, wait for the connection, navigate to a portal in a web browser, watch an ad and click a silly legal disclaimer and then, finally, connect (except when the connection fails for no apparent reason). Often, there's a password, requiring a scavenger hunt to discover. Airplane Wi-Fi is, of course, even more painful.

Compare the inconvenience of accessing public Wi-Fi with the ease of 5G: I get off the plane, switch on my phone, wait a few seconds, and I'm online with a solid connection. That's true whether I'm making a short commuter hop across the state, or flying thousands of miles to Europe or Africa. Why can't Wi-Fi be that easy?

"We have a name for that — we call that Portal Pain," McPherson said. It's not just an inconvenience; it's a business problem for venues such as hotels and stadiums. It's the number one concern for Cisco customers such as airports and theme parks. That's why Cisco implements OpenRoaming, which enables users to authenticate using credentials from operators and providers such as Apple, Samsung and Google. Supporters of OpenRoaming include AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile.

At some large sporting events, such as the Super Bowl, tens of thousands of devices connect to Wi-Fi without ever having to select an SSID — and that ties in to the theme of Wi-Fi and 5G coexisting, because Wi-Fi offloads traffic from cellular networks, O'Rourke said.

For users, wireless connectivity needs to just disappear. Users shouldn't have to know or care whether they're on Wi-Fi or 5G. Enterprises, squeezed between always-on AI workloads, denser networks and leaner IT teams increasingly need the network to manage itself. And carriers must deliver on those needs.

As to the other two questions: Yes, a hot dog is a sandwich. And the toilet paper should go over the top; that was settled when toilet paper was patented in 1891

Read more about wireless networking:

Cisco report flags AI wireless security risks, talent shortages

Cisco Live: Cloud Control harnesses AI agents for infrastructure ops

There's a new kind of convergence in town: Wi-Fi + private cellular