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back to article Make room, Wi-Fi, Qualcomm wants to run LTE on your 5GHz band

Qualcomm says it will begin shipping new chips later this year that will help relieve mobile network congestion by routing LTE mobile broadband traffic over short-range, unlicensed radio frequency bands. The new system-on-chip (SoC) components include support for LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U), an extension of the LTE Advanced …

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  1. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Well...

    On the one hand, I'm not a fan of having cell cos use an unlicensed band, potentially crapping it up for other uses, to provide LTE at the high per-GB rates they charge. On the other hand, I suppose where these would be located, well, a warehouse or something that may run 5ghz wifi just wouldn't have an LTE cell in it too, and it's not too likely you'd end up with one outside your place interfering with home use.

    I *would* be interested in the possibility of using LTE on 5ghz to just provide data service in general (i.e. like an "LTE access point" instead of wifi), I'd be interested to see how 5ghz LTE holds up against 802.11n or 802.11ac in terms of performance (especially under load.)

    2 0 Reply
    1. Christian Berger
      Reply Icon

      Re: Well...

      "I'd be interested to see how 5ghz LTE holds up against 802.11n or 802.11ac in terms of performance (especially under load.)"

      Well that's actually rather predictable. LTE requires cooperation of all base-stations using the same band. So LTE in a scenario like Wifi would grind to a halt.

      0 0 Reply
  2. Mage Silver badge
    Devil

    Patents

    Increased patent revenue for Qualcomm. That's the motivation.

    This is a bad idea for every existing user of WiFi, esp in Apartment blocks etc.

    5 0 Reply
  3. Roland6 Silver badge

    Stealth takeover of the spectrum by 4G/LTE ?

    This announcement is made against the backdrop of two significant statements of intent by the LTE vendor/operator community:

    1. The use of LTE to create fermocell's and replace WiFi.

    2. The demand for more spectrum and specifically the spectrum currently being used by terrestrial broadcast TV.

    So whilst there is nothing actually stopping the used of the unlicensed 5GHz bands for LTE, I do question what is the long-term game plan here - particularly as unlicensed spectrum doesn't earn any licensing revenue...

    Perhaps the regulator, in a far-sighted move, should make the spectrum released from shuffling the TV channels around unlicensed...

    0 0 Reply
  4. Down not across

    Get off my lawn, err, wifi.

    Of course Qualcomm would say it didn't cause issues for wifi. I'm not convinced.

    2.4GH is already a struggle in many places (just streets, not even apartment blocks). 5GHz is fairly good at the moment, helped by not being as widely used and having shorter range.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Alan Brown Silver badge
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      Re: Get off my lawn, err, wifi.

      "2.4GH is already a struggle in many places (just streets, not even apartment blocks)."

      It's effectively unusable where I am.

      "5GHz is fairly good at the moment, helped by not being as widely used and having shorter range."

      That and having a lot more usable non-overlapping channels.

      5GHz LTE _will_ have to compete with 5GHz Wifi. This could get interesting.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Roland6 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Get off my lawn, err, wifi.

        >5GHz LTE _will_ have to compete with 5GHz Wifi. This could get interesting.

        Definitely will get interesting, as from an infrastructure perspective, 5GHz LTE will have to better 5GHz WiFi both from a throughput and capacity viewpoint but also from a cost perspective. I suspect that in-building LTE will look very similar to in building WiFi, only the equipment will be badged 'Qualcomm' instead of 'Cisco'.

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