Wi-Fi’s Problem with LTE Over Unlicensed Spectrum

Carriers working to maintain capacity as demand for wireless broadband grows must see a big pool of unlicensed spectrum as an oasis. Cisco says global mobile traffic increased by 69 percent in 2014 and the company predicts it will increase 10-fold between now and 2019. That’s a lot of exabytes that need to be sent over the air and some carriers are looking toward moving LTE into unlicensed bands in order to handle in the influx. The idea is that LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) can work in tandem with LTE on licensed spectrum to open larger channels for uplink and downlink. T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless have already announced their plans to deploy the technology in the 3.5 GHz band and the 5 GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) band. The carriers have begun discussions with chipset, network and device vendors to make it possible and are eying early 2016 for initial deployments. But Wi-Fi equipment vendors and operators are concerned about LTE potentially interfering with or overpowering Wi-Fi signals, causing considerable or complete degradation to a technology upon which millions rely.