Tag Archives: WiFi

Are Americans Abandoning Wireline Data?

Copper CableA study conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that there has been an increase in households that have mobile data as their only source of broadband. Certainly this huge survey that got 53,000 responses must be considered as statistically valid. One thing the survey showed is that broadband has become a commodity and more people than ever before have some sort of broadband.

The survey also showed that having landline broadband is tied to household income. Nearly one third of households that make under $25,000 per year have mobile data as their only broadband product. And that is up from 16% of these households in 2013. This must be a function of affordability and it’s not hard to see how lower income homes can’t afford both smartphones and landline broadband.

But the survey showed other trends that were a surprise. The survey shows that 18% of homes making between $50,000 per year and $75,000 per year have mobile-only data, a huge jump upward from 8% in 2013. And 17% of homes making between $75,000 and $100,000 are now mobile-only, another big jump up from 8% in 2013. The survey showed that even 15% of homes making more than $100,000 have gone to mobile-only data, another big increase from 6% in 2013.

But there are other industry statistics that don’t seem to jive with these numbers. All of the publicly traded ISPs routinely report customer counts and for 2015, as a whole, the industry showed a net increase of over 3 million new landline broadband connections last year. Industry analysts are expecting almost the same increase for the whole ISP industry in 2016. With about 125 million total households in the country that will mean that nearly 5% more of total households will have added landline broadband in 2015 and 2016. That huge increase in landline data connections seems to contradict the survey numbers.

Certainly there must be many people (particularly in urban areas) that can get by without a landline data connection. In cities there is more and more WiFi available. People have WiFi at work and more and more businesses in the city provide it as a convenience to their customers. And there are plenty of people living in tightly packed apartments that share a WiFi connection with a nearby neighbor.

But it’s hard to think this can account for the huge shift shown by the survey. If the survey is correct, then as many as 10% of all homes have abandoned a landline data connection since 2013 – over 12 million homes – and the industry numbers just don’t back that up.

Certainly any big user of data at home must have a landline connection. Nobody is going to use mobile data for watching video or playing online games. Nobody is even going to use mobile data for any serious amount of school work or for taking work home from the office. The small data caps make that far too expensive.

Our big cellular companies have priced mobile data to be among the most expensive broadband in the world when measured as cost per downloaded gigabit. Nobody who uses any significant data is going to use data that is as much as 100 times more expensive as a landline data connection unless they have no choice. There are certainly plenty of households in rural areas who use their cellular data connection as the only source of broadband. They use it very sparingly and still report getting huge monthly bills for mobile data.

I have no idea how to reconcile these two very different set of facts. We know the number of landline data connections that ISPs sell and that number tells a very different story than this survey. And while it’s anecdotal, I can’t think of one of my hundreds of clients who is not seeing annual increases in landline data customers.

But this survey asked the question to 53,000 respondents, and in the world of statistics this means the information received from the survey should be extremely believable. The survey results would be very suspect if the questions were misleading or if the survey was not administered randomly. But I would think that an organization like the Census would have been careful to have gotten these things right. This difference between these two sets of facts is a puzzle and I am sure that over time that the trend will become clear – whatever it is. But for now I am very skeptical of the survey results until they have been collaborated with other data.

Three Years and Counting

2014_Rolling_Sculpture_Car_Show_67_(1969_Porsche_911_S)Today is the three year anniversary of this blog. I started writing this blog as a way to force myself to keep up with industry news. During the first month of writing the blog I worried that I would quickly run out of topics. But I underestimated then how dynamic our industry has become. The changes from just three years ago are amazing. Instead of running out of topics I often have to toss away topics because I can’t get to them fast enough.

I mostly write about the topics in the industry that I find most interesting, but I must be striking a chord because I pick up new readers to the blog daily. I now know that I am the only one writing daily about broadband and related topics and it makes me happy to see that others find these topics to also be of interest. Just since I’ve started this blog we’ve seen the following changes in the industry (and this is a short list):

An Activist FCC. The current FCC has waded into more new topics than any other FCC in my memory. The most significant one is the net neutrality decision that reclassifies broadband as a regulated service. But there have been many other rulings from this FCC. There was a time a few years ago when industry pundits predicted that regulation was dying, but it has done just the opposite.

Exploding Demand for Broadband. The penetration rates for broadband have continued to grow and in urban areas it seems like we are getting close to the time when everybody that can afford broadband has it. But there are still huge numbers of rural homes and businesses without broadband and they are starting to stridently demand it.

Growth of the OTT Industry. While Netflix has been streaming content a little longer than I have been writing this blog, the whole OTT phenomenon has really taken off in the last few years. Netflix now claims over 75 million customers and there is now a growing host of other OTT providers. Online video has completely transformed the Internet and video is by far the majority of online traffic.

New Products from the IoT. There are new products available to carriers for the first time in many years. I have a number of clients who are now successfully selling security and a number of them are getting into home automation and the many other related services associated with the Internet of Things.

Use of WiFi instead of Wires. It’s become recently obvious that the large ISPs have abandoned home wiring for delivering data. They now bring bandwidth into the home to a central WiFi router and don’t install wires to anything else. But a single WiFi router is already not sufficient for high-bandwidth homes and the next trend in this area is going to be the networking of multiple WiFi routers.

Services in the Cloud. More and more services are moving to the cloud. Carriers can buy voice and cable TV programming from the cloud today, something that was unimaginable just a few years ago. It was always assumed that expansive bandwidth made cloud cable TV impractical, but as bandwidth prices continue to tumble it makes more sense to buy programming from the cloud instead of building or maintaining a cable headend.

Public Private Partnerships. There were very few Public Private Partnerships a few years ago and now it’s something that everybody talks about. This is particularly relevant in rural America where communities are willing to kick in money to find a broadband solution. But we are even seeing this in urban areas, such as the deal just announced between Google Fiber and Huntsville.

Erosion of Landline and Cable Customers. Landline penetration rates are now under 50% nationwide and we are starting to see the erosion of traditional cable customers. The challenge for the next few years will be for triple play providers to find ways to replace these shrinking revenues and margins.

Massive Realignment of Rural Subsidies. We’ve seen subsidies shrink for small telcos. Access charges are being phased lower and the Universal Service Fund is being redirected from telephone to broadband. This has put a lot of pressure on some small carriers, but anybody who survives the end of this shift will probably be ready to succeed in the long run.

Wi-FM

Wi-FiAnytime there are too many WiFi networks in the same proximity it’s inevitable to have contention between networks. Such contention will cause a WiFi network to slow down since the current WiFi standards tells a WiFi device to back-off whenever it sees interference, meaning that two neighboring WiFi networks will both back off when there is contention. People with slow WiFi tend to blame their router for their problems, but often it is this contention that is slowing them down.

Using research first done at MIT and recently revived at Northwestern University, engineers have figured out a way to greatly reduce the contention between neighboring WiFi networks using a technology they are dubbing as Wi-FM since it uses a tiny slice of FM frequency to resolve conflicts.

It’s not hard to imagine situations where WiFi can become congested. For instance, consider somebody living in an apartment building who has other WiFi routers over, under and on all sides, all relatively close. We tend to think of WiFi as being a pretty reliable transmission medium, but when there are many networks all trying to work at the same time there can be a tremendous amount of interference, and a major degradation of throughput.

The Wi-FM technology uses the tiny slice of FM radio spectrum that is reserved for the Radio Data System (RDS). This is the spectrum that is used to transmit the content information about the FM radio programming and is used in your car radio, for example, to tell you the name of the song and the artist you are listening to.

Along with the broadcast information the RDS system also utilizes a time slot technology that allows it to sync up the broadcast information with songs as they change. The Wi-FM technology takes advantage of these time slots and uses the quiet times when there is no broadcast information being sent to monitor the WiFi signals and to direct packets so that they don’t interfere.

WiFi utilizes multiple channels, and if all channels are used efficiently then much of the interference between neighboring networks can be avoided. But there are no techniques that can direct WiFi to change channels on the fly that can be done easily from inside the WiFi spectrum without eating up a lot of the available spectrum in the effort. Using the slice of FM frequency as an external traffic cop allows for the rapid routing of contentious packets to different channels and can greatly reduce contention and interference.

This technology would probably be best used today in places like apartment buildings where there are multiple WiFi networks. But we are moving into a future where there is likely to be a lot more WiFi interference. For example, there are plans to use a continuous WiFi signal to power cellphones and small IoT sensors. And the cellular industry wants to use WiFi as overflow for LTE calls.

So however busy WiFi is today, the chances are that it’s going to get a lot busier in the future. And that means there will be lot more interference between packets. Wi-FM is just one of many techniques that are probably going to be needed if we want to keep the public spectrum usable in busy places. Otherwise, the interference will just accumulate to shut the spectrum down at the busiest times of the day.

A Network Without Wires

Wi-FiThere is an emerging trend in the industry to try to create home networks without wires. ISPs and cable companies are all putting a lot of faith into WiFi as an alternative for wires running to computers and settop boxes.

It’s an interesting trend but one that is not without peril. The problem is that WiFi, at least like the big ISPs deliver it, is not always the best solution. The big cable companies like Comcast tend to provide customers with a cable modem with a decent quality WiFi router built in. This router is placed wherever the cable enters the home, which might not be the ideal location.

A single strong WiFi router can be a great device in a home with a simple network and uncomplicated demands. A family with two TVs, one computer, and a few smartphones is probably going to do fine with a strong WiFi router as long as the house isn’t too large for the signal to get where it’s needed.

But we are quickly changing to a society where many homes have complex data needs scattered throughout the house. People are likely to be demanding video streams from all over the home, and often many at the same time. There are bound to be a few computers and it’s not unlikely that somebody in the house works at home at least part of the time. Demands for big bandwidth for things like gaming and the new virtual reality sets that are just now hitting the market are increasing. And we are on the verge of seeing 4K video streams at 15 Mbps. On top of all this will be a variety of smart IoT devices that are going to want occasional attention from the network.

When a home gets crowded with devices it’s very easy to overwhelm a WiFi router. The new routers are pretty adept at setting up multiple data paths. But with too many streams the router will lose efficiency as it constantly tries to monitor and change the bandwidth for each stream it is managing. When this happens a home network can bog down, dropping the efficiency of the router precipitously.

There are a few solutions to this problem. First, you can run wires directly to a few of the bigger data eaters in a house and remove them from the WiFi network. Just make sure in doing so that you also disable having them search for a WiFi signal. But people don’t really want more wires in their home, and ISPs definitely do not like this idea.

The other solution is to add additional WiFi hotspots in the home. The simplest example of this are WiFi repeaters that simply amplify the signal from the base WiFi hotspot. However, repeaters don’t improve the contention issue, they simply bring a stronger signal closer to some of the devices that need them.

A more complex solution is to set up a network of interconnected WiFi hotspots. This consists of separate WiFi routers that all feed through one base router, a configuration that is familiar to any network engineer but alien to most home owners. The main problem with this solution is obvious to anybody who has ever operated a network with multiple routers – getting them to work together efficiently. Setting up a multiple-router network can be challenging to those unfamiliar with networks. And if configured poorly this kind of network can operate worse than one big hotspot.

But these kinds of interconnected WiFi networks are the cutting edge of home networking. I was recently talking to an engineer from a mid-size cable company and he admitted that as many as 20% of their customers already need this kind of solution. It’s a bit ironic that the demand for WiFi is mushrooming so soon after the ISPs went to the one-router solution. The percentage of homes that need a better solution is growing rapidly as homes jam more devices onto WiFi.

So there is an opportunity here for any ISP. Customers need better networks in their homes and there is a revenue opportunity in helping them to set these up. The downside, at least for now, is that this is labor intensive and there may be a lot of maintenance to keep these networks running right. But there are a number of vendors looking into solutions and one would hope that home WiFi networks will soon become plug and play.

The Battle for Public Spectrum

Wi-FiIt’s fairly obvious that we are going to need more unlicensed spectrum going into the future. We are already stressing the existing WiFi blocks of spectrum and there are more planned uses for WiFi coming in the near future. Cisco recently estimated that by next year that over half of all mobile data is going to be off-loaded to WiFi. Cisco also estimates that by 2020 that there will be over 50 billion IoT devices and that most are going to use WiFi to communicate with the world. In possibly the biggest use of WiFi on the horizon, the large cellular companies want to use the most common WiFi blocks of spectrum for making cellular calls during busy times of the day.

A few weeks ago Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced the Promoting Unlicensed Spectrum Act. This bill, if passed, would require the FCC to consider unlicensed spectrum any time they make a change in the allocation of spectrum. It would require the FCC to establish a long-term strategy to make sure that there is always enough unlicensed spectrum to meet our needs. This is most recent of several attempts to take a stab at the issue and this is becoming one of the new policy battlegrounds at the FCC.

Of course, like any big national battle these days, money is behind the battle and the lines have been drawn on both sides of the issue. On one side is the Wi-Fi Alliance which represents all of the companies that make money from WiFi. This includes the vendors that make WiFi devices and radios and all of the companies that have products that want to use WiFi like the IoT companies. On this side of the fight are also the groups that represent the public interest like Public Knowledge as well as Silicon Valley where all of the big web companies like Facebook and Google want as many people connected the Internet as possible.

On the other wide are groups that are pro-licensed spectrum. For example, TV station owners are very upset that the FCC is considering setting aside several UHF bands for WiFi in each market. The license holders of this spectrum view this as taking their valuable spectrum without offering them fair compensation.

And so, like most commercial battles, there will be the war of lobbyists. But there seem to be a lot more large companies on the side of expanding WiFi, which should give that side an edge in the battle. Besides, this seems to fit into the FCC’s existing mindset and they have been considering more WiFi even without such new laws.

WiFi has been called the spectrum of innovation, which seems like a pretty apt name. Over the last few decades there has been a huge number of different ways to use WiFi, which was only made possible because companies were willing to tackle the R&D knowing that they had the spectrum available.

Much of our licensed spectrum in the country goes to waste. The FCC divvies out huge blocks of licensed spectrum. In metropolitan areas where there is a huge amount of demand this spectrum sometimes gets used to the maximum. But even that is not always the case because there are large sections of spectrum, like the LMDS and the MMDS spectrum that was auctioned a decade ago where the technology was never fully developed and where the spectrum now sits mostly unused.

That is probably the biggest drawback of licensed spectrum. The ways that it can be used are limited to the interests and plans of the license holders. When a new block of licensed spectrum gets awarded the vendors all descend making sales pitches on how to best use it. But the final call is up to the license holders, and they generally have a fairly specific and narrow vision of what they want to accomplish with the spectrum. There generally is no innovation in licensed spectrum other than what the license holders are willing to pay for.

And in rural America most blocks of spectrum go unused. Rural areas will see some cellular spectrum used as well as a handful of point-to-point microwave spectrum, but for the most part the vast majority of spectrum blocks go completely unused in rural areas. This is sad because there is spectrum that could do a much better job at delivering rural data than WiFi, but which is off-limits for public use.

I have no idea if this legislation is going to move out of Congress, and perhaps it doesn’t matter much if it does. The FCC already seems to favor more WiFi and so this legislation just forces them to do what they already seem to be doing. But you never know when the political tide will change and so it’s probably better to make this the law rather than leave it as an FCC policy.

Is There a Business Case for Free WiFi?

Wi-FiLately I have seen numerous press releases about free WiFi networks in various cities. I can certainly understand why a City would want to provide free WiFi if it can afford it since there are numerous benefits to citizens from having ubiquitous WiFi. But most of these press releases talk about having private companies supply the WiFi. And that makes me ask the question: is there a business case to be made for providing free WiFi?

Probably the most talked about recent example is where Google agreed to retrofit the numerous abandoned payphone booths in New York City into free outdoor WiFi hotspots. But Google is different than anybody else who would do this and perhaps they will gather enough data through these various free connections and sell enough advertising to make this pay for itself. I suspect that even for them this won’t be profitable, but I can grant them the benefit of the doubt and perhaps for them this will work financially.

But it’s hard to see the case for other private providers. For instance, in Pittsburgh a start-up, Meta Mesh, is hoping to bring free WiFi throughout the city. Their business plan hopes to get funded by grants from Google and the Braddock Community Development Corp. They will then place commercial mesh routers throughout the city and hope that households and businesses will agree to add their WiFi connections to the larger mesh.

This again sounds like something beneficial for the city in that it will provide WiFi to those who can’t afford it. But it doesn’t seem like much of a permanent business plan. Grant funding is notoriously unreliable and while they may raise the money to get this going, it’s quite a challenge to keep getting grants year after year to keep it going. If they hit one dry spell in raising money the project probably dies. And to a large extent they are not really deploying WiFi but are instead counting on homes and businesses to agree to share their bandwidth with others.

I hope what I wrote doesn’t sound like I am belittling the project, because it will provide great community benefits if it works. My question is rather to ask if this is a permanent business model that can be sustained and copied elsewhere. These kinds of efforts are usually local and very much depend upon a few key people to make them work and to keep them working. With no reliable customer-based revenue stream it’s really hard to maintain something that is being done for altruistic rather than monetary purposes.

Another similar project is the solar-powered trash cans that will provide WiFi in lower Manhattan. These are also being provided by a non-profit company in conjunction with a trash removal company and are funded through grants from the city and others.

These efforts show that a city might be able to get WiFi started through a non-profit. But time is going to tell if this is sustainable. I can remember numerous similar WiFi projects that were started over the years and I think each of them eventually fizzled out.

Cities can certainly provide WiFi directly as a municipally-funded community benefit. Wikipedia lists 57 US cities that currently provide some sort of public WiFi. I am familiar with many of the cities on the list. In some cases they only provide WiFi in and around city buildings like City Hall or perhaps also in their local airport. And there are many other cities that provide WiFi that are not on this list. I also know that many of these cities deployed WiFi many years ago, and the speeds available with the older WiFi technology probably means that they offer speeds in the range of a few Mbps. That was a great speed when it was launched but is woefully inadequate today.

And that is my real concern. WiFi, like most technologies, is rapidly changing and anything deployed in the past is obsolete today, and anything deployed today will soon be obsolete once HotSpot 2.0 is perfected and as soon as MIMO antennas get better. Deploying an alternate bandwidth source for a community is going to require constant upgrades to make WiFi keep up with public expectations. And upgrades are expensive and it’s hard to maintain an adequate network in a world where the amount of data that people and households use doubles approximately every three years.

I wish all of these ventures good luck and I hope they can make it work. And I hope that more cities expand their free WiFi because it can be a huge benefit to those who can’t otherwise get bandwidth. But I have yet to see a sustainable financial model, other than perhaps a direct tax subsidy that can both pay for the initial WiFi deployment and then keep up with the needed upgrades to keep it relevant.

What is 5G?

Cell-TowerThe International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has created an official plan to bring 5G data to the market by 2020. So what is 5G and how does it differ from 4G? The goal of 5G is to increase the data capacity of cell sites, reduce latency, and increase the distance that can be served from a cell site. The goal of 5G is to build a wireless data path with built-in intelligence that can maximize the data delivery to a given handset or device. There is no specific bandwidth goal in the 5G plan, but it’s assumed to be a lot faster than today’s 4G networks.

But there are a lot of challenges to overcome to get to that future vision. Delivering more bandwidth is going to require more spectrum. Every slice of spectrum in use has limitations imposed by physics, and since today’s spectrum is already stressed, achieving 5G will mean adding more bands of spectrum into the cellular network.

It looks like the ITU is depending upon using both existing WiFi spectrum as well as a lot of higher frequencies that are not in use today. I’ve recently written about the wireless industry’s hope of poaching existing WiFi spectrum and I hope the FCC stops that attempt in its tracks. If 5G is ever allowed to use WiFi then that spectrum will quickly become a cellular spectrum that won’t be useful for anything else.

There is a lot of development work to be done to use higher frequencies, particularly for handsets. The higher the frequency used, the bigger the challenge to hold a connection with a non-fixed receiver like a handset. Even if they solve these issues, the higher frequencies they are considering, by definition, travel very short distances, and so the higher frequency portion of 5G will only benefit those very close to a cell site. This might be a great solution inside of a convention center, but not so much in the outside world.

What all of this means is that a 5G network is going to require a lot more cell sites packed closer together than today’s network. That has a lot of implications. First, it means a lot more investment in towers or in mini-cell sites of some type. But it also means a lot more fiber to feed the new cell sites. And those two factors together mean that any 5G solution is likely to be an urban solution only, or a suburban solution only for those places where a lot of users are packed tightly together. No wireless company is going to invest in a lot more 5G towers and fiber to cover suburban housing sprawl and certainly nobody will invest in the technology in rural areas.

We already have a cellular wireless divide today with urban areas getting pretty decent 4G and rural areas with 3G and even some 2G. Expect that gulf to become greater as high-bandwidth technologies come into play. This is the big catch-22 of wireless. Rural jurisdictions have always been told to wait a while and not clamor for fiber because there will eventually be a great wireless solution for them. But nobody is going to invest in rural 5G any more than they have invested in rural fiber. So even if 5G is made to work, it’s not going to bring a wireless solution to anywhere outside of cities.

I’ve read a number of technologists who are skeptical about the targeted 2020 date for 5G, but it’s the nature of progress to set aggressive goals in order to goad improvement. But when you look at all of the issues that must resolved to implement 5G, 2020 looks unrealistic.

Instead, what is likely to happen is that the carriers will implement some pieces of 5G over time as each technological challenge is solved. This means we are likely to see a whole series of incremental upgrades over the next decade rather than one big flash-cut to a faster data network. This will provide numerous marketing opportunities and I would expect that by the time that the ITU’s version of 5G is fully implemented we will be calling it 10G. After all, we are still a long way from meeting the original specification for 4G, which was to implement 100 Mbps data speeds for a moving user in a car and 1 Gbps for a stationary user. Even the planned 5G isn’t going to do that.

LTE-U

Cell-TowerRecently, the NCTA asked the FCC to make sure that wireless carriers don’t interfere with WiFi spectrum. I wrote a blog a few weeks ago talking about all of the demands on WiFi, and the threat that the NCTA is warning about is another use of the already busy WiFi spectrum.

Cellular carriers are using LTE technology to deliver 4G data. Cellular carriers today deliver 4G data and voice using spectrum for which they have paid billions (at least in the US and Europe). But in urban areas the LTE spectrum is already stressed and the demand for the existing spectrum is growing far faster than the carriers can find new spectrum to offload the extra demand.

The cellular carriers have had their eye on the 5 GHz unlicensed band of spectrum that is used for WiFi. This is a big swatch of spectrum that in some markets is larger than the band that some carriers have for LTE. Recently, various carriers have been experimenting with using this public spectrum to deliver LTE. Huawei and NTT demonstrated this capability last August; Qualcomm showed this capability at the CES show earlier this year. It’s rumored that T-Mobile plans to run a trial of this technology this year.

This new technology is being called LTE-U (for Unlicensed). NCTA filed at the FCC on behalf of their cable company members who use this WiFi spectrum to deliver WiFi for various uses such as distributing data wirelessly around a home or to bring data to settop boxes. They are worried that if the cellular companies start using the spectrum that they will swamp it and make WiFi useless for everybody else, particularly in urban areas where WiFi is under the most pressure.

That certainly is a valid concern. As my recent blog noted, the list of companies and technologies that are planning on using WiFi spectrum is large and growing. And there is already notable stress on WiFi around crowded places like large hotels, convention centers, and stadiums. The fear is that if cellular carriers start using the spectrum this same crowding will spread to more places, making the spectrum useless to everyone.

The cellular carriers argue that the swath of WiFi is large enough to allow them to use it without hurting other users. They argue that nobody can use all of the 400 MHz of spectrum in that band all at once. While that is true, it doesn’t take a huge pile of LTE-U customers at one time to locally overdraw the WiFi spectrum in the same manner that they are overloading the cellular spectrum today.

Engineers tell me that LTE uses the spectrum more efficiently today than does most WiFi technologies. This is due to the fact that the LTE specifications very neatly limit the bandwidth that any one customer can draw while most WiFi applications will let a user grab all of the bandwidth if it’s available. This means you can fit a lot more LTE customers into the spectrum that might be assigned to one WiFi customer.

There is a characteristic of WiFi that makes it incompatible with the way that LTE works. WiFi has been designed to share spectrum. When one customer is using WiFi they can grab a huge swath of spectrum. But when another customer demands bandwidth the system dynamically decreases the first connected customer to make room for the second one. This is very different than how LTE works. LTE works more like a telephone network and if there is enough bandwidth available to handle a customer it will assign a band to the customer or else deliver a ‘busy signal’ (no bars) if there us not enough bandwidth. The problem with these two different operating systems is that LTE would continually grab spectrum until it’s all used and the WiFi users are shut out, much like what you might get in a busy hotel in the evening.

The LTE providers say they have handled this by introducing a new protocol called LAA (Licensed Assisted Access) which introduces the idea of coexistence into the LTE network. If it works properly, LAA ought to be able to coexist with WiFi in the same manner that multiple WiFi customers coexist. Without this change in protocol LTE would quickly gobble all of the free WiFi spectrum.

But this still doesn’t answer the concern that even with LAA there could be a lot of people trying to grab bandwidth in environments where the WiFi is already stressed. Such a network never shuts anybody out like an LTE system will, but rather will just keep subdividing the bandwidth forever until the amount each customer gets is too small to use.

It will be interesting to see what the FCC says about this. This was discussed years ago and the FCC never intended to let licensed cellular holders snatch the public WiFi spectrum. I will also be curious to see if wireless carriers try to charge customers for data usage when that data is being delivered over a free, unlicensed swath of spectrum. And how will customers even know that is where they are getting their data?

I hope the FCC doesn’t let the wireless carriers run rampant with this, because I think it’s inevitable that this is going to cause huge problems. There are already places today where WiFi is overloaded, and this new kind of data traffic could swamp the spectrum in a lot more places. The wireless carriers can make promises all day about how this won’t cause problems, but it doesn’t take a huge number of LTE-U users at a cell site to start causing problems.

Are We Expecting too Much from WiFi?

Wi-FiI don’t think that a week goes by when I don’t see somebody proposing a new use for WiFi. This leads me to ask if we are starting to ask too much from WiFi, at least in urban areas.

Like all spectrum, WiFi is subject to interference. Most licensed spectrum has strict rules against interference and there are generally very specific rules about how to handle contention if somebody is interfering with a licensed spectrum-holder. But WiFi is the wild west of spectrum and it’s assumed there is going to be interference between users. There is no recourse to such interference – it’s fully expected that every user has an equal right to the spectrum and everybody has to live with the consequences.

I look at all of the different uses for WiFi and it’s not too hard to foresee problems developing in real world deployments. Consider some of the following:

  • Just about every home broadband connection now uses WiFi as the way to distribute data around the house between devices.
  • Comcast has designed their home routers to have a second public transmitter in addition to the home network, so these routers initiate two WiFi networks at the same time.
  • There is a lot of commercial outdoor WiFi being built that can bleed over into home networks. For example, Comcast has installed several million hotspots that act to provide convenient connections outside for their landline data customers.
  • Many cities are contemplating building citywide WiFi networks that will provide WiFi for their citizens. There are numerous network deployments by cities, but over the next few years I think we will start seeing the first citywide WiFi networks.
  • Cable companies and other carriers are starting to replace the wires to feed TVs with WiFi. And TVs require a continuous data stream when they are being used.
  • Virtual reality headsets are likely to use WiFi to feed the VR headsets. There are already game consoles using WiFi to connect to the network.
  • There is a new technology that will use WiFi to generate the power for small devices like cellphones. For this technology to be effective the WiFi has to beam continuously.
  • And while not big bandwidth user at this point, a lot of IoT devices are going to count on WiFi to connect to the network.

On top of all of these uses, the NCTA sent a memo to the FCC on June 11 that warned of possible interference with WiFi spectrum from outside through the LTE-U or LAA spectrum used for cellphones. Outside interference is always possible, and in a spectrum that is supposed to have interference this might be hard to detect or notice for the average user. There is generally nobody monitoring the WiFi spectrums for interference in the same ways that wireless carriers monitor their licensed spectrum.

All of these various uses of the spectrum raise several different concerns:

  • One concern is just plain interference – if you cram too many different WiFi networks into one area, each trying to grab the spectrum, you run into traditional radio interference which cuts down on the effectiveness of the spectrum.
  • WiFi has an interesting way of using spectrum. It is a good spectrum for sharing applications, but that is also its weakness. When there are multiple networks trying to grab the WiFi signal, and multiple user streams within those networks, each gets a ‘fair’ portion of the spectrum which is going to somehow be decided by the various devices and networks. This is a good thing in that it means that a lot of simultaneous streams can happen at the same time on WiFi, but it also means that under a busy load the spectrum gets chopped into tiny little steams that can be too small to use. Anybody who has tried to use WiFi in a busy hotel knows what that’s like.
  • All WiFi is channelized, or broken down into channels instead of being one large black of spectrum. The new 802.11ac that is being deployed has only two 160 MHz channels and once those are full with a big bandwidth draw, say a virtual reality headset, then there won’t be room for a second large bandwidth application. So forget using more than one VR headset at the same time, or in general trying to run more than one large bandwidth-demanding application.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if these problems manifest in homes and businesses. I am imagining a lot of finger-pointing between the various WiFi device companies – when the real problem will be plain old physics.

A Business Case for WiFi Hotspots

Wi-FiLately I have been asked a number of times if there is a business case to be made for providing a large outdoor WiFi hotspot network. Today I will look at the two issues that answer that question:  1) the hardware available today and;  2) the revenue opportunities.

Hardware Issues. The WiFi industry is currently in a state of what I call ‘between’. This often happens when a new standard is being introduced. There have been existing hotspots on the market for many years. But the whole industry is moving towards implementing Hotspot 2.0, which is a standard that allows for roaming between hotspots the same way that cellphones roam between cell towers. But since the coverage distance of a hotspot is far less – around 250 feet at most from a hotspot – roaming is even more of an issue for WiFi.

With Hotspot 2.0 fully implemented, a customer can automatically log in when walking within range of a hotspot. But more importantly they will maintain whatever they are doing  (such as a web session or IP phone call) without interruption as they move to a new hotspot (as long as they don’t hit a dead area). But the units on the market today can best be characterized as pre-Hotspot 2.0 and they do not yet include all of the features needed to fully support roaming. This means any units you buy today are going to need an upgrade eventually to a standard that is not yet fully defined.

The units on the market today are also very expensive compared to older hotspots. The manufacturers are concentrating on high-capacity hotspots that can handle as many as 500 simultaneous users. These are complicated hotspots with multiple antennae and cost as much as ten times as the old simple hotspots. But these are what are selling and they are made for stadiums, event centers, busy shopping districts or places where there will to be a lot people. But a citywide deployment doesn’t need many hotspots with that huge capacity, but rather much cheaper and lower capacity units that also do Hotspot 2.0.

Revenue Opportunities. The revenue opportunities for an outdoor WiFi network are not clear. I don’t know of any hotspot networks that have been able to pay for themselves. But there may be new revenue opportunities coming that could improve the picture.

There are two traditional WiFi revenue opportunities. One is to sell access to the WiFi network by the hour, by the day or by the month – traditional ISP services. There are customers in any town who would prefer WiFi to more expensive cellular data if you can create good enough coverage. You can sell this to individuals or in bulk to large employers in a town that have employees who work outside. The other traditional revenue opportunity it to sell dedicated hotspots to restaurants and other businesses that want to offer a branded hotspot for their customers. This will require that you (or somebody) provide a broadband connection to that customer to feed the hotspot.

There are two revenue opportunities on the horizon today. The first is to offer WiFi phones. These phones are being offered today in two ways. First, there is the WiFi-only phone like Cablevision is offering and that only works on WiFi. Cablevision prices this at $9.95 per month for an existing cable customer and it’s nearly all margin. But there are several wireless resellers (and now also Google) who sell WiFi phones that will roam to cellular when WiFi is not available.

The primary issue with copying this business plan is that the companies doing it have all created a proprietary system that works only on a specific phone. That is not something easy for a smaller company to work out. There are some cheap Chinese WiFi-only phones available, but if you choose them you are competing against people’s preferences to use an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy by forcing them to your handset choice. This is not likely to be very popular until it becomes an app that will work on any phone.

The other new revenue opportunity is to sell wholesale WiFi access to others. I know Cisco has been touting this opportunity for several years. But I have yet to hear of anybody who has been able to monetize the idea. The cellular companies love it when customers use their phones on WiFi, but that’s a far cry from them being willing to buy time on your network on their customer’s behalf.

My conclusion of all of this is that it looks a tough business case today to build a citywide WiFi network. Right now the network hotspots are too expensive for a mass deployment. But there are vendors working on lower-cost hotspots. It also makes sense to wait until Hotspot 2.0 is fully fleshed-out and functional rather than buy a network with undefined future upgrade costs. And on the revenue side, while it sounds interesting to sell bulk WiFi, I have a hard time recommending this as a business plan unless you have presold some large customers like a utility or other carrier to buy bulk access to your new network. I have always been leery of ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ business plans and I could recommend this only if there is a clear path to monetize it.