Wireless Industry Committed to Collaboration on LTE-U, Mobile Future Says
Mobile Future urged the FCC to ignore suggestions from the cable industry or anyone else that the agency impose new regulations on LTE-unlicensed. LTE-U “is designed to avoid interference to existing operations,” the group said Friday in a blog post.…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“With hundreds of millions of consumers using devices that rely on Wi-Fi, wireless carriers would not risk undermining their customers’ wireless experience. These companies are committed to working collaboratively to find technical solutions and address any issues.” The FCC asked some important questions on LTE-U in a recent public notice, Mobile Future said. “But with technologies evolving faster than regulators can respond, key technical decisions are best made by network engineers, not through government intervention,” the group said. Meanwhile, FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp asked the LTE-U Forum a series of technical questions in a Wednesday letter posted in docket 15-105. He asked how LTE-U would utilize a “listen-before-talk” technique called carrier sense adaptive transmission (CSAT). "Though the record reflects significant testing of CSAT sharing protocol with Wi-Fi, commenters did not provide information regarding the rationale behind the selection of certain key parameters for CSAT,” Knapp wrote. “Specifically we would like to know, what was the basis for selecting the maximum permissible transmission and minimum listening periods? Some specifications seem to suggest that these parameters are implementation-dependent and may be set by operators. Please explain the decision to have CSAT transmit on a channel even if it appears to be occupied.” Knapp also asked if aspects of the control channel used in most iterations of LTE-U can be used to control or change any of the parameters of CSAT. “Will the unlicensed channel be used for downlink (one-way transmission) only, and if so, how does the LTE system know what capacity is available in the unlicensed channel and therefore how to manage the traffic between the licensed and unlicensed spectrum?” he asked Dean Brenner, Qualcomm senior vice president-government affairs. “How does the client device respond; does it only respond with acknowledgments in the licensed band? What does the licensed system assume about the availability of spectrum, for example that CSAT will find a channel no matter whether the spectrum is heavily occupied?” Knapp asked for a response within 30 days.