Licensed and unlicensed spectrum will both be necessary, and will coexist in the world of 5G, says AT&T Labs AVP Dave Wolter, while unlicensed spectrum increasingly will achieve “carrier grade” performance.
That especially is illustrated by the development of LTE-U, LTE Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) and MulteFire, all part of the LTE unlicensed family of protocols. Note that where LTE-U and LTE-LAA are designed to work with LTE, MultiFire actually is designed to be a stand-alone protocol operating strictly over unlicensed spectrum.
LTE WLAN Aggregation (LWA) is another proposed way of combining licensed and unlicensed spectrum while preserving quality of service.
Those developments neatly illustrate why some have objected to the “best effort only” requirements imposed by net neutrality rules. Though such rules inevitably say reasonable network management policies are allowable, nobody ever can figure out what that means, in practice, as “maintaining quality of experience when the network is congested” nearly inevitably involves some rationing of customer use of the network.
And, by definition, that means active blocking or traffic shaping, which is a violation of net neutrality rules.
In arguing that “carrier grade performance” is to be supplied over a mix of licensed and unlicensed connections, one has to admit that “quality” requires management of previously unmanaged resources. In other words, “best effort” does not work for carrier services, that will apply to use of Wi-Fi or other unlicensed spectrum to support carrier services using those local assets.
But if “best effort” does not work, then neither do network neutrality policies that mandate that is the only lawful way consumers get access to internet services.
To be sure, carrier voice and other services are not “internet” apps in a strict sense, even if they use IP networks and protocols. But the differences between managed services and internet “best effort” services are becoming quite muddled, as bonded licensed and unlicensed resources are used to support services that do have a quality-of-experience dimension.
In its original “weak” form, network neutrality was an appropriate framework for ensuring customer access to all lawful apps, without blocking. In its “strong” form--outlawing quality of service mechanisms--the concept inevitably will be eroded.
As a method for dealing with other issues, especially antitrust or predatory behavior, network neutrality is a hammer. But not every internet freedom issue is a nail.
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