Non-licensed Spectrum

Given that up to 70 percent of mobile device usage happens within premises, Wi-Fi can be an effective instrument to reduce load on carrier networks and keep spectrum usage at optimal levels.

That’s right. We are talking about the spectrum available for services like Wi-Fi, which have undergone revolutionary capacity enhancements with the advent of 802.11ac technology and its ongoing evolution in Wave 1 and Wave 2 products. The technologies operate in the 5MHz bands and massively overcome the spectrum-scarcity limitations posed by the earlier 2.3-2.4 MHz frequency bands generally associated with previous Wi-Fi standards like 802.11b/g/n.

A hallmark of 11ac technologies is the availability of ultra-wide channels of 40 MHz and 80 MHz (and even more) that are well suited for the delivery of bandwidth-intensive HD voice and video applications. Moreover, a new feature called beam-forming makes it possible for 11ac controllers to dynamically aggregate two or more channels to a given user or application. (This may be seen as akin to the carrier aggregation feature available with LTE-A.)

These advanced features hold the promise to leverage unlicensed bands as viable extensions to the licensed spectrum. Given that up to 70 percent of mobile device usage happens within premises, Wi-Fi can be an effective instrument to reduce load on carrier networks and keep spectrum usage at optimal levels.

In fact, there can be two aspects of leveraging unlicensed spectrum — through consumer as well as carrier Wi-Fi, and through LTE Unlicensed. Consumer Wi-Fi application could be simply about encouraging use of access points at customer premises to offload mobile broadband traffic and thus free up the network for users that are mobile in the given cell area. However, any direct monetization of such Wi-Fi usage is mostly unlikely. Moreover, service providers would have little control over quality-of-service issues, which though much mitigated by 11ac feature, could still occur and compromise customer experience.

Carrier Wi-Fi could enable service providers to address QoS issues by way of direct management of the network, and also give them the opportunity to monetize Wi-Fi usage in effective ways. In fact, the deployment of carrier Wi-Fi networks can be done in an accelerated and relatively seamless manner, thanks to the maturing of cloud Wi-Fi offerings. Service providers could leverage such offerings for a range of service applications, including but not limited to 3G/4G offloading, backhauling and managed WAN services.

Moving on to LTE unlicensed, it has the potential to open wholly new mobile broadband possibilities for service providers. LTE and LTE-A vendors have come out with offerings that enable service providers to work with specific unlicensed frequencies in an integrated manner with licensed LTE assets. Typically an LTE-A anchor located in the licensed band could aggregate channels from both LTE licensed and LTE unlicensed bands to deliver a fatter wireless pipe to the users.

In fact, service providers could use one or a combination of various options, depending on where they are in the evolution cycle at a given point in time. Nevertheless, it does make good strategic sense to start putting a roadmap in place (if they haven’t already done so) for a phased employment of unlicensed frequency bands as an integrated part of their future offerings.