Korean Institute Tests Prove LTE-U, Wi-Fi Can Play Well Together, Qualcomm Says
New tests by the Korea-based Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute found that LTE-unlicensed and Wi-Fi can peacefully coexist in unlicensed 5 GHz bands, said a blog post Thursday by Patrik Lundqvist, Qualcomm director-technical marketing. “In this over-the-air demonstration, LTE-U co-existence…
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was put to the test in scenarios with a large number of Wi-Fi access points (APs) from Cisco and Wi-Fi stations (STAs) from Samsung, all sharing the same 20 MHz channel in 5 GHz,” Lundqvist wrote. The baseline was made up of 15 Wi-Fi APs, “all on the same channel, where each AP was connected to one user (STA),” he said. “Each STA was at a relatively close distance to its corresponding AP, which means that the signal quality was sufficiently guaranteed.” The tests verified the LTE-U operations didn’t interfere with the Wi-Fi operations, he said. Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless Future Program at New America, said concerns remain. “It is helpful that the Korean institute tested one of several scenarios related to the still open question of whether LTE-U can coexist with Wi-Fi without disrupting the ecosystem nearly every consumer depends on for affordable mobile device connectivity,” he said. But other very different scenarios still must be examined, Calabrese said. “For example, the Koreans apparently assumed users would be close to the Wi-Fi access point,” he said. “Consumers, schools and smart city deployments need to be very worried about the impact on Wi-Fi when users are further away from the access point. If LTE-U does not detect [access points] at a signal level similar to the coexistence protocol in use by Wi-Fi, the coverage areas of deployed Wi-Fi hotspots could be cut in half. In that case, LTE-U would create an unnecessary tragedy of the commons.”