Worries Mount Over Upcoming LTE-U Deployments Hurting Wi-Fi

alphadogg writes: LTE-U is a technology developed by Qualcomm that lets a service provider broadcast and receive signals over unlicensed spectrum, which is usable by anybody – specifically, in this case, the spectrum used by Wi-Fi networks in both businesses and homes. By opening up this new spectrum, major U.S. wireless carriers hope to ease the load on the licensed frequencies they control and help their services keep up with demand. Unsurprisingly, several outside experiments that pitted standard LTE technology or 'simulated LTE-U' technology, in the case of one in-depth Google study, against Wi-Fi transmitters on the same frequencies found that LTE drastically reduced the throughput on the Wi-Fi connection.

Comments

Re:Oh good, more contention.

[SherifHanna]

LTE-U doesn't use the 2.4GHz spectrum. It only uses a fraction of the channels in the 5GHz UNII band (only UNII-1 and UNII-3...no UNII-2). That means that LTE-U actually leaves the vast majority of spectrum in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz unlicensed bands exclusively for use by Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies.

Re:Oh good, more contention.

[kuhnto]

To emphasize what the previous poster stated, it is nice to get a good visual of how our spectrum is diced up and see who has the big chunks...

I present "The US Frequency Allocation Table -> https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...