Carrier Aggregation and Private LTE Hey, guess what? Remember when I talked about LAA, LTE-U, and CBRS, well, we’re almost there! That’s right, all those add-ons that we talked about over a year ago may finally be released. The new CBRS spectrum in the US creates new opportunities. It will be a game changer once … Continue reading LAA, CBRS, LTE-U are 5G Building Blocks! →
Carrier Aggregation and Private LTE
Hey, guess what? Remember when I talked about LAA, LTE-U, and CBRS, well, we’re almost there! That’s right, all those add-ons that we talked about over a year ago may finally be released. The new CBRS spectrum in the US creates new opportunities. It will be a game changer once the FCC decides what will happen with the spectrum. I just want to deploy, something they are delaying even longer, over a year, come on, release something! Sorry, it’s just that government holds back the economy by trying to improve it, this is a classic example. It happens in every administration.
Let’s look at 2 things, 1) a way to supplement what the carriers have, and, 2) a private LTE network. While you think this is just another system, it’s on the road to 5G. That’s right, we need spectrum, and there is plenty of it. Where? I’ll tell you if you have the nerve to read on.
LAA – Licensed Assisted Access
First, it’s the ISM spectrum, you know it better as the Wi-Fi spectrum. It could be 900MHz, 2.4GHz, 5.8GHz or even 60GHz. All that spectrum that Wi-Fi could operate in, but they primarily use 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz. Now we can run LTE in that spectrum; it’s called LTE-U and Qualcomm created MuLTEfire to allow LTE to run without a core. You heard me, an independent LTE-U hotspot that the carriers and your device will like a lot.
LTE-U is in the spectrum of Wi-Fi but is true LTE. It’s in the unlicensed band. MuLTEfire is a stand-alone LTE unit. While that doesn’t mean much now it will when all the devices have it, like your smartphone. Learn more here, https://www.multefire.org/about/ if you’re interested in learning more. Maybe you want to read a book, available on Amazon with my affiliate link, found here, where you can learn more about LTE in unlicensed bands. It’s going to be great when we can use LTE for everything. I see this as a great thing. RCR wrote about it last year, https://www.rcrwireless.com/20170530/network-infrastructure/what-is-multefire-tag6-tag99. It’s really a great thing.
Why? I am glad you asked. You see the carriers can use LTE-U to gain bandwidth with their current LTE spectrum. They use something called LAA, which I wrote about in the past, but now it’s right around the corner. What’s that? You don’t remember anything about LAA, let’s have a flashback! LAA, which is soon to be used by the primary carriers to build up throughput, is Licensed Assist Access. That uses carrier aggregation to aggregate, (make all the RF carriers look like one big pipe), create separate streams that all combine in the end users’ device to make the throughput go through the roof. We are talking about throughput closer to 1Gbps to the device. Hell, I would settle for 100Mbps to happen.
There is also LWA, Licensed Wi-Fi Aggregation, same as the above but it uses Wi-Fi to aggregate. Now, you’re wondering why LWA isn’t the preferred choice, right? I would say because it’s so much work to get Wi-Fi to work with LTE. Seriously, those 2 formats are not playing well together. They have delay differences and to be honest the carriers are sick and tired of trying to make it work. I will give T-Mobile a lot of credit because they seemed to have a solid way to make it work. I am not sure why,