As soon as the article brought up plans of carriers to expand LTE into the unlicensed 5GHz band, I immediately thought about the implications for current users of WiFi. Specifically that high-powered LTE would overwhelm the signal output by home WiFi routers and in other typical scenarios.
The article comes essentially to to the same conclusion, and it will be unfortunate if new FCC regulations have to be created. It seems to be human nature that sooner or later powerful interests stop "playing nice", and start acting like bullies until regulators are forced to step in.
Of course it doesn't have to go that way, but what are the odds that it won't?
Yes, my thoughts flew to the same thing. This is a recipe for regular users getting stomped.
Allowing organized and coordinated commercial exploitation of unlicensed bands is a total violation of the intention of those bands. If you want to run your home router, fine, but when you turn it into a business that has the potential to cause a meaningful disruption of other users you need to either get a band of your own or contract/integrate with someone who does (like a cell carrier).
The proposal in the LTE standard is not to use high-power transmissions, like those used for macrocells in licensed spectrum, in the unlicnensed band. This wouldn't be allowed anyway by existing regulations. The proposal is to use a form of LTE with low-powered tranmissions (in fact subject to exactly the same regulatory limits as WiFi) in the unlicensed band.
All unlicensed band technologies are subject to the same regulations on power levels. While of course these may be changed I don't think there is a realistic chance that, even with heavy lobying, one particular technology would ever be given different rules from all the others.
Basically all unlicensed technologies have to coexist as best they can. WiFi interfers with other WiFi users. Bluetooth interferes with WiFi etc. The questions are:
1) whether LTE-Us coexistence strategy is reasonable
2) whether the economic power of the carriers means that LTE-U might be deployed so densely that other users of unlicensed spectrum suffer degraded service
Part 97 is the amateur radio rules in the U.S. Part 15 is the catch all of FCC rules. If it's not define in some set of rules, then it's likely covered in 15.
I think it's interesting (and scary) to consider this in the context of how smartphone vendors seem to be really dragging their heels on 5GHz WiFi on all but the high-end phones. If we're going to be broadening use of 5GHz, we should be doing it in a way that is interoperable with the existing deployments. At the very least, nobody should be allowed to ship a device that supports 5GHz LTE but doesn't support 802.11ac.
The article comes essentially to to the same conclusion, and it will be unfortunate if new FCC regulations have to be created. It seems to be human nature that sooner or later powerful interests stop "playing nice", and start acting like bullies until regulators are forced to step in.
Of course it doesn't have to go that way, but what are the odds that it won't?