Will Wi-Fi 'Only' Ever Be Sufficient to Run a National Mobile Network?

Perhaps it is not literally true that the distinction between licensed and unlicensed spectrum is now essentially irrelevant, a relic of the analog era of communications, as U.S. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says.

But many would agree there is much truth to Wheeler’s contention that “in 2014, licensed and unlicensed spectrum are more complementary than competitive.”

“They are less oil and vinegar and more peanut butter and jelly,” Wheeler says, with mobile service providers using Wi-Fi to offload more than 45 percent of smartphone traffic to fixed networks.

Still, ask any mobile service provider executive, and odds are about 99.9 to one that licensed spectrum still is the essential foundation for a mobile service provider business plan, at least for facilities-based service providers.

To the extent that the “peanut butter and jelly” analogy is apt, it suggests that although primary reliance on licensed spectrum remains strategic for mobile service providers, unlicensed is part of the access fulfillment.

Application providers, who often rely on widespread unlicensed bandwidth, might in the future also find some scenarios where they might also be willing to pay fees for assured access or quality of service, if not for exclusive use.

But it remains an intriguing thought that, someday, public Wi-Fi might provide the primary method of supporting a mobile service operation. The extent to which that is feasible will vary from market to market. Few yet believe Wi-Fi can provide the exclusive access, not backed up by mobile network access.

In fact, some think mobile service providers are the logical entities to provide national public Wi-Fi services.  

That is a different matter than relying on offload of mobile Internet traffic to Wi-Fi to supplement and complement primary mobile access

Though a few service providers rely on Wi-Fi as a major access method, nobody really has tried to create a mobile service operation based exclusively on Wi-Fi access, which probably tells us it is not really feasible, at least not yet.

That will not stop entrepreneurs from revisiting the potential, especially as ISPs work to build ubiquitous consumer Wi-Fi networks that partition access on home networks, with a protected customer account and then a public shared portion of the access network.

When a true “Wi-Fi-only” mobile service starts to be feasible is not clear. In fact, it might never be possible, on a sustainable commercial basis.

Instead, we might only see mobile networks that make extensive use of public and private Wi-Fi, for quite some time.

That is not to say an "Internet only" network, designed to support untethered use of "most of the places you want to interact with Internet apps", and not providing full voice coverage, is not be feasible.