Is Wi-Fi in Danger?

[Commentary] Wi-Fi may be one of the best ideas anybody ever had. When the technology was still expensive, 20 years ago, its main application was connecting servers to computers in the workplace and to cash registers in large retail stores. It still serves those purposes today … and more. Now the cell phone companies have plans to make greater use of Wi-Fi frequencies in ways that may cause real trouble for Wi-Fi. The phone companies look at their debt from past purchases of auctioned spectrum, and think about how to finance yet another auction coming up later in 2016. Then they look at the free, unlicensed spectrum used by Wi-Fi. They reason, as any rational person would, that moving more traffic off the expensive auctioned spectrum and into the free Wi-Fi bands could save money. This works best, though, if they don’t use 802.11-type Wi-Fi, but instead use a version of LTE – called LTE-U – which is designed to function on the unlicensed spectrum used for Wi-Fi.

The problem? In response to a Federal Communications Commission inquiry on the question, Google says that LTE-U will hog the channel and not let Wi-Fi get through. Qualcomm, which developed LTE-U, says in response that Google is wrong – that LTE-U is “a friendly neighbor” to Wi-Fi. About a hundred other parties have weighed in. All this puts the FCC in a bind. From a legal standpoint, the FCC presently has no authority to exclude LTE-U. But from a practical standpoint, Wi-Fi has become so important to the economy, and such a major convenience in people’s lives, that to let LTE-U degrade it would be unthinkable.