I was delighted to have Gerardo Giaretta of Qualcomm on Wi-Fi NOW TV this week – you can catch the full program here and it’s certainly worth your while to do so. Here’s why I’m excited about LTE/Wi-Fi Link Aggregation (LWA):
LWA brings Wi-Fi and LTE together at the link layer. It lets Wi-Fi do its thing in the unlicensed band and LTE in the licensed band. Everything is in it’s proper place, so to speak. Qualcomm will get nobody in the Wi-Fi industry fretting over LWA. In fact, we’re delighted about it.
LWA anchors the service in LTE for control but it does so at the system level without invading any band. It also offers mobility.
Here’s an interesting perspective: If you have a ‘carrier Wi-Fi’ network (meaning centralised control of the APs) you could serve this up as a third party to carriers who would want a piece of your Wi-Fi capacity for LWA. And you could still carry on using the rest of your Wi-Fi capacity for other things.
I’m not a big believer in co-located Wi-Fi/LTE radios. But the non-colocated case adds (at least at a theoretical level) a whole new dimension to a prospective future carrier Wi-Fi business case. And this is a big deal.
LWA is to my knowledge the best network-centric approach to mobile/Wi-Fi convergence thought up by the 3GPP ever by a long shot. It’s right now the mobile industry’s best bet at bringing together Wi-Fi & cellular into a consistently managed carrier service and one possible hope of fending off OTT, device-centric offload.
Ericsson & Co. won’t be happy because it will bite a chunk out of their base station market. But consumers will certainly like this.
So Qualcomm: Let’s push LWA more… and now LTE-U can you please go away… Looks like we really don’t need you anyway 🙂
Above graphic courtesy of Qualcomm Inc.
/Claus
For more on LTE-U and LWA don’t miss Qualcomm at Wi-Fi NOW Amsterdam. Check out our program here and register now!
