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

Posted by timothy on from the one-or-the-other dept.

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.

7 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Perfect for Hotels! by ZipK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Now hotels will have a legal way to jam your personal hotspot!

  2. Oh good, more contention. by jandrese · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The 2.4 Ghz spectrum was opened up for general use because it has relatively poor long distance characteristics thanks to it being absorbed strongly by water. This lead to an explosion of use in the band where your average apartment building has dozens of devices competing for the spectrum. And now cell companies are coming full circle and stomping all over it themselves. Maybe the government could take the hint that maybe another ISM band or two would be highly welcome. Maybe they could skip selling off spectrum for billions of dollars to enormous companies and instead open it up the way they did the 2.4 Ghz band? Spectrum seems a bit over regulated at the moment, there's barely any room for entities that aren't massive corporations with billions of dollars to do anything.

    Over regulation is stifling innovation.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Oh good, more contention. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Over regulation is stifling innovation.

      I've got news for you: keeping spectrum open for unlicensed use by small players IS regulation. Without regulation, giant telcos and broadcast entities could stomp all over whichever spectrum they choose without regard to whether it's ruining your WiFi.

      Stop arguing against regulation and argue against poor regulation.

    2. Re:Oh good, more contention. by SherifHanna · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Oh good, more contention. by kuhnto · · Score: 5, Informative

      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...

      --
      "A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
    4. Re:Oh good, more contention. by dpidcoe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, if someone is actively trying to prevent me from talking to my wi-fi base station, they can do that. But what kind of idiot would throw gigawatts of power across gigahertz just so they'd interfere with my signal?

      They don't need to continuously jam it, they just need to make it drop out enough to be obnoxious. Sending out a pulse crafted to disconnect people from their wireless access points several times an hour would be enough to annoy the non tech savvy into just buying a 4g connection for everything.

  3. Spectrum Grab by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is just a spectrum grab by the telcos. The key thing about this technology is that it requires a small control channel in the frequency range "owned" by the telco, but blasts all sorts of data over the unlicensed 5GHz spectrum.

    It would be one thing if the entire connection was done in the unlicensed spectrum, so anyone could set up an LTE network (like wi-max), but to require licensed spectrum just to require it should not be allowed.