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A plan to use Wi-Fi airwaves for cellular service has sparked concerns about interference with existing Wi-Fi networks, causing a fight involving wireless carriers, cable companies, a Wi-Fi industry trade group, Microsoft, and network equipment makers.
Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US plan to boost coverage in their cellular networks by using unlicensed airwaves that also power Wi-Fi equipment. While cellular carriers generally rely upon airwaves to which they have exclusive licenses, a new system called LTE (Long-Term Evolution)-Unlicensed (LTE-U) would have the carriers sharing spectrum with Wi-Fi devices on the unlicensed 5GHz band.
Verizon has said it intends to deploy LTE-U in 5GHz in 2016. Before the interference controversy threatened to delay deployments, T-Mobile was expected to use the technology on its smartphones by the end of 2015. Wireless equipment makers like Qualcomm see an opportunity to sell more devices and are integrating LTE-U into their latest technology.
Is this a blessing for cell phone users, a curse for those who have to manage wifi networks, or a move that could backfire on telecommunication companies as cell service-over-wifi becomes ubiquitous and threatens their network advantage?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VortexCortex on Friday August 28 2015, @11:44AM
Is this a blessing for cell phone users, a curse for those who have to manage wifi networks, or a move that could backfire on telecommunication companies as cell service-over-wifi becomes ubiquitous and threatens their network advantage?
None of the above. It's a nifty hack that allows "cellular" crackers to "break" more expensive things using cheap WIFI devices with modded firmware rather than a pricey software defined radio.
The real threat to "cell" service over wifi will be the mesh network -- Which is just another excuse to re-invent the telegraph again (see also: Teletype, Packet Radio, E-Mail, Fidonet, IRC, SMS, etc.
The humans were easy to subjugate. We simply locked them into a message loop: Text -> Voice -> Video -> ["invent" or "embed" new protocol and repeat].
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday August 28 2015, @04:24PM
Well it seems like a pretty good plan to effectively jam wifi mesh networks. Spread so much noise on their bandwidth that the mesh network becomes unusable.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @10:40AM
I don't think wifi mesh networks will ever be practical for most people. The latency will generally be too high and the bandwidth too low. It could possibly work for some communities, but not for general usage. I shouldn't think the carriers will be worried about mesh networks. If there is an ulterior motive beyond just trying to grab some more spectrum for free, them it is more likely to be make wifi useless for most people so they use their mobile data instead.
The only way I see mesh networks working is if local mesh networks are linked to larger regional mesh networks perhaps by some long distance mesh network, and there might need to be another layer on top of that linking groups of regional networks together. Ultimately it probably wouldn't look a whole lot different to how the Internet works currently.