Can WiFi coexist with LTE for unlicensed spectrum?

“The focus of the wireless industry has been on improving old-G specifications in isolation, with special attention on increasing capacity. It has been assumed that this is all that the consumers need. But consumers seem to be more interested in having uninterrupted access to voice and data services everywhere they go. Therefore adding capacity alone will not meet their needs.” said Niko Louvranos, Business Development Manager, Telecomms, Arqiva. “It is therefore important that the wireless industry focuses on delivering a truly consumer-centric experience by developing a Cellular and WiFi managed service proposition that is fit for purpose. Otherwise, I’m afraid that we will lose the forest for the trees.”

“The thirst to use the abundant license-free spectrum for LTE has started to create friction with plans that extend to deploying LTE to elbow WiFi out from the unlicensed spectrum altogether,” commented Sami Susiaho, Head of Edge Technologies, The Cloud Networks, BskyB. “While regulators have stated that they won’t get in the middle of this debate and let the industry sort itself out, thankfully the two camps have finally sat around a table to discuss how to facilitate fair co-existence between these technologies. But there is a significant risk as the worst case scenario would see LTE coming to license free without a sufficient co-existence mechanism or one that it is made ‘optional’ in the deployments.”

Speakers at the event agreed that integrating the two technologies in a way that benefits users is preferable to simply focusing on enhancing LTE or WiFi in isolation.

“The role of WiFi is drastically changing in an increasingly mobile centric world and this shift in priorities and expectations from users is forcing every operator to reassess how they deliver services and connectivity” said Edward Ellis, Senior Corporate Strategy Manager, EE.

In his talk Milan Bavisi, MBB Solution Manager at Nokia, addressed what kind of data speeds are likely to become available as we move from LTE - Advanced towards 5G. He also touched on some areas of LTE - Advanced that are likely to play a key role in the 5G story.

“We are still at the beginning of the long-term evolution considering the data speeds mobile operators are able to offer in today’s networks. However, as more spectrum becomes available and the ecosystem continues to develop, there is likely to be a massive potential uplift in data speeds on offer to a mobile user.”