Sevana: Wi-Fi plays a starring role at Small Cells Americas

Small Cells Americas, a 9-year-old event that takes place each fall in Dallas, Texas, highlighted a carrier Wi-Fi track on its agenda for the first time last year. This year, Wi-Fi was a dominant theme throughout the event as LTE-U, voice over Wi-Fi and heterogeneous networks were all major topics of discussion.

“A lot of CIOs get hetnets now,” said AT&T’s Gordon Mansfield, former chair of the Small Cell Forum. Mansfield said that in the past, AT&T talked to enterprise customers about “bolting Wi-Fi onto cellular.” Now the conversation is reversed, he said, because companies would rather think about “bolting cellular onto Wi-Fi.”

Mansfield said that VoWi-Fi is working well on AT&T’s network, including VoLTE handoffs. The carrier recently signaled its intent to launch VoWi-Fi soon by asking the Federal Communications Commission to grant it a waiver to offer the service without support for hearing-impaired customers.

VoWi-Fi gives AT&T the opportunity to offer enterprises Wi-Fi for most parts of a venue, supplementing with small cells for the most congested or mission-critical areas. Mansfield said companies are more willing to share costs with AT&T in these types of deployments than in expensive distributed antenna systems.

VoWi-Fi also holds huge promise for rural carriers, which have less spectrum than the nationwide operators. Nathan Sutter, director of network operations and engineering at Nex-Tech Wireless, told a panel that his company would like to rely on Wi-Fi more, but that most customers are not willing to set up Wi-Fi calling on their phones.

“Until there’s no interaction required, we’ll get at most 5-10% of users doing this,” he said. “Every new smartphone comes with a manual, but most users leave it in the box.” He added that Hotspot 2.0, which enables seamless connectivity to enabled access points, is still a long way off for rural America, where he said people are slower to updgrade both smartphones and Wi-Fi hot spots.

Sutter said that he is unsure about the value proposition for Wi-Fi-first mobile offers, but there are plenty of believers in this model. This week mobile virtual network operator FreedomPop said it has received funding from Intel Capital to launch a Wi-Fi first smartphone next year.

Vendors that support the carriers are pivoting to support connectivity in unlicensed spectrum. Earlier this year, InterDigital spun off a company called XCellAir to help operators use software to manage small cells. Within a few months, XCellAir had changed its focus and now bills itself as “the unlicensed spectrum expert,” offering remote management solutions for Wi-Fi access points.

LTE-U

The move to leverage unlicensed spectrum has mobile operators and their chip suppliers looking at ways to integrate LTE into the unlicensed bands. At Small Cells Americas, many attendees shortened their lunch breaks to watch a Broadcom demonstration of LTE in unlicensed spectrum. The chipmaker showed a throughput rate of 270 megabits per second with LTE and Wi-Fi sharing spectrum, versus 250 megabits per second with Wi-Fi alone.

While many members of the cellular industry were converging on Dallas for Small Cells Americas, a number of their counterparts who make and test Wi-Fi equipment were in Palo Alto, Calif., for a Wi-Fi Alliance workshop. The Wi-Fi Alliance is also testing spectrum sharing for LTE and Wi-Fi, and is urging the FCC to wait for its test results before authorizing any LTE-U equipment.

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