Mobile substitution has proceeded in waves, with 2G mobile voice displacing first long distance calling, then email, then fixed line voice entirely, for many consumers.
In the 3G era, Wi-Fi offload has been an important end user experience tool, providing end user experience that often was better than when users stayed on the mobile network. But mobile internet access generally was not a substitute for fixed access.
In the 4G era, mobile speeds often are better than Wi-Fi speeds, and in some cases, mobile internet access could be used as a substitute for fixed internet access. Tariffs were the biggest barrier to full substitution, as mobile cost-per-gigabyte remained so much higher than fixed network cost-per-gigabyte.
In the 5G era, mobile end user experience might be equal to, or better than, fixed network performance. In part, that eventually will happen as huge quantities of new spectrum are made available, as small cells become routine parts of the mobile infrastructure and as spectrum aggregation techniques, blending licensed and unlicensed spectrum, are deployed.
Small cells are useful for any number of reasons, including intensive frequency reuse and ability to use unlicensed spectrum in the 5-GHz band, featuring 400 MHz of spectrum.
The ability to aggregate licensed mobile and unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum in a small cell can dramatically improve end user experience, in terms of internet access speed. In recent tests conducted by Signals Research Group, gigabit LTE device performance more than doubled over a licensed-only deployment, using devices able to use 600-MHz LTE-Advanced, with spectral efficiency boosted 30 percent to 40 percent.
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