Eventually, LTE-U will be Allowed to Use Wi-Fi

All the predictable claims and counterclaims about coexistence of Long Term Evolution 4G mobile access with Wi-Fi notwithstanding, the matter in the U.S. market ultimately will be resolved by the industry itself, the process the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has said it prefers.

As with most prior major disputes between powerful industry interests, some compromise will be reached that allows mobile operators to bond LTE capacity with available Wi-Fi resources, even if powerful Wi-Fi interests would prefer such access be barred.

The reason for optimism is that as a matter of law, some protocols for Wi-Fi sharing, such as LTE-U, cannot lawfully be barred in the U.S. market, even if matters are different in other markets, where a “listen before talk” protocol is mandatory.

In those other markets, there arguably is even less truth to the notion that allowing LTE devices access to Wi-Fi, on the same basis as other Wi-Fi networks and devices, would be unusually harmful, beyond the simple observation that the number of devices contending for access is increased.

Opponents of LTE-U say high use of LTE-U on any single Wi-Fi site degrades overall throughput. The issue is that high usage degrades any single Wi-Fi location. So it is difficult to separate the impact of higher loading from the specific impact of LTE-U devices.