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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @09:41AM
Oh hell no. If you're going to run LTE at Wi-Fi frequencies, why not just use WiMax?
I'm sitting on a WiMax connection operating at 2.6 GHz, and let me tell you, building penetration at this frequency has always been poor. Indoors the device will only establish a connection in the attic, anywhere else indoors it tries and fails to connect, and it loses its signal completely in the basement. Now personally I'm not complaining because over the years I have learned to live with the limitation and I'm perfectly happy with it, but I can imagine that most people would not be pleased.
I also have an LTE connection operating on band 12 at 700 MHz, by imminent necessity because Sprint will shut off WiMax in November and LTE is The Future(!). LTE doesn't have the same building penetration issues as WiMax, for now, because LTE operates at lower frequencies than Wi-Fi and WiMax. But it sure would be dumb if LTE wins the 4G competition only to adopt the same frequencies as WiMax and suffer the same problems that made WiMax a failure.