Unlicensed spectrum eyed for easing wireless capacity crunch

As data consumption by smartphone users increases exponentially every year, wireless technology companies are looking to harness the unlicensed spectrum normally used for WiFi connections to improve cellular performance. Ericsson AB, which claims to be the largest wireless equipment provider in the world, and Qualcomm Inc., which makes mobile chips for both consumer devices and enterprise clients, released information about their efforts to expand LTE into unlicensed 5 GHz spectrum (LTE-U) during the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. Eric Parsons, head of mobile broadband at Ericsson Canada, said LTE-U is the latest innovation in the push to extend the capabilities of wireless networks. “Spectrum is a finite resource,” he said in a phone interview from Las Vegas on Wednesday. “As the operators have now achieved coverage necessary for the rollout of 4G technology, they're now looking at capacity growth. And you can either do that by adding more spectrum, which is costly when it comes to the licences, or using unlicensed.” Governments around the world control access to the wireless airwaves, including those frequencies most useful for mobile communication. Canada’s 700 MHz spectrum auction raised $5.27 billion early last year, and more spectrum auctions are planned for this year. Some spectrum, such as the frequencies used for WiFi in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz ranges, does not require a licence, in part because those frequencies are only suitable for short-range use. The LTE standard already includes the potential for carriers to combine multiple slices of spectrum into one broad band in order to improve speeds. Rogers Communications Inc. was the first company to adopt so-called carrier aggregation technology in the Canadian market, announcing in October that it had implemented technology to allow users to use 700 MHz and AWS spectrum simultaneously. Parsons said the latest and fastest version of cellular technology currently in the market, LTE-Advanced, is designed to take advantage of as much as 100 MHz of spectrum. “Very few operators have that much spectrum in the licensed portion,” he said. “So by leveraging what is often underutilized unlicensed spectrum, operators can realize the full potential of LTE-Advanced.” In order to do so, he said, wireless carriers will have to deploy small cells, or locally focused wireless antennas that can provide LTE connection over the 5 GHz band. He cited examples such as a busy shopping mall or a large sporting venue, which already have extensive coverage but need to add extra capacity for speed and simultaneous users. “As the operator identifies hot zones where there's really a need to lift performance, they have a tool in place to augment their existing cellular deployments with this functionality,” he said. “By combining licensed spectrum at the lower frequencies with the unlicensed spectrum typically at the higher frequencies, we can ultimately help address the gap that exists in consumers' data growth demand versus what can be realized with existing spectrum.” Parsons said Ericsson plans to have LTE-U “commercialized in the fourth quarter” of 2015 and in general use by the first half of 2016. On Monday, American carrier T-Mobile US Inc. said in a news release it would be running trials for LTE-U in the latter half of this year. Rasmus Hellberg, senior director of technical marketing at Qualcomm, said his company expects the near future to feature a thousand-fold increase in data usage from 2012. “It's driven by more richer content, more video, more devices when everything's connected,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “Obviously, end users are not willing to pay a thousand times more for the data service. You have to find cheaper solutions to provide all this capacity to mobile operators.” LTE-U is an elegant solution, he said, because it is easier for carriers and equipment makers to use a single technology over multiple bands of spectrum rather than integrate other communications protocols such as WiFi into the cellular network. “If you take LTE and put it into unlicensed spectrum, you have this tight integration for free because nothing has more tight integration to LTE than LTE itself,” he said. Hellberg said the use of unlicensed spectrum is that simple to implement, however. Although the band itself is unregulated in most countries in the world, the technological requirements for devices that take advantage of it vary between North America, the European Union and Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea. Such concerns will be addressed once the LTE-U specification is adopted in the international wireless industry group 3GPP, he said, which is expected to be finalized in March 2016. Hellberg cautioned, however, that LTE-U is not a complete solution for the coming wireless capacity crunch, and that WiFi, aggregation of licensed spectrum and other technologies will also play a part. “There's not just one solution that solves everything here,” he said. Alex Pavlovic, director of technology at research firm Nordicity, said the benefits of LTE-U may not be as evident for Canadians versus the citizens of smaller countries. “For us in Canada, this means good news for a few pockets of densely populated areas,” he said. “But Canada doesn’t have a capacity problem. We’re still building coverage.” Pavlovic said that while LTE-U is one tool in the arsenal for carriers looking to increase capacity, some are actually reluctant to embrace the technology. “They're not really against it, they're just trying to put reins on the pace of the development,” he said. He said come companies see the continuing evolution of existing LTE networks, combining the latest in “micro-cells” with “macro-networks” and carrier aggregation, as a big enough technological challenge and “a much more pressing near-term deliverable” than LTE-U. — With reporting by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Unlicensed spectrum eyed for easing wireless capacity crunch

News | January 9, 2015

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