About twelve years ago Wi-Fi began to find its way into the market and into the mainstream, forever changing the practice of accessing the Internet for users worldwide. And while the number of cellular wireless users and Wi-Fi-enabled homes and enterprises are different by an order of magnitude, Wi-Fi has become a true force in the marketplace. It has been marginalized, however, as a contentious, shared network that cannot be trusted.
Wi-Fi solutions are well designed for the sharing of resources with minimum configuration, while cellular is designed for optimum individual connection and requires major configuration management. Ideally, of course, a middle ground can be found above the mesh of Wi-Fi networks and below the complexity of cellular Self-Organizing Networks.
The Blue Sky ahead of us is in the 3.5Ghz spectrum and is associated with a concept called Shared Access Spectrum [SAS]. In effect, the precedents the FCC set forth for TVWS (TV White Space) are being applied to other spectrum allocations, the first of which is 3.5Ghz. There are lots of technologies that could be applied here (e.g., WiMAX), however the most exciting and economical is Unlicensed LTE.1. What this means is that large deployments can be made that deliver high performance, high speeds and high availability, all of which adds a new economic alternative to the marketplace of networks. Thus, in effect, unlicensed LTE can deliver something in the middle, between having a network interface that shares the spectrum with everyone, and carrier services in which the network becomes a higher priority than the services it provides. And as this middle ground — I mean air — is defined, opportunities for integrators will be revealed.
If we look at the M2M marketplace, we see that SIM card solutions have a specific marketplace where nomadic and mobile guide the decisions to work with carriers, and premise or fixed assets often use Wi-Fi, ZigBee or LAN technology to network the information. For many M2M applications, the selection of network is an afterthought, and many of the vendors have shared anecdotes of customers drawing clouds without planning for one. So the issues of networking and configuration were left out of their planning. This middle ground promises to become a rich area in which companies and integrators can deliver more coverage and less dependence on external resources. Logical places for First Adopters include campus environments, hospitals, industries, municipalities and utilities. Often these enterprises have considered owning their own facilities and found the licensing and uncertainty of policy to be a stumbling block.
SAS uses the databases first developed for TVWS to, in effect, enable spectrum to be allocated for the applications in the range they will be used. So, for example, a large enterprise that wanted to GeoFence a quarry or a warehouse hub would not be interfering with another spectrum requirement for a hospital or sky resort offering safety monitors.
In essence, we have new opportunities somewhere in between traditional cellular and Wi-Fi, and I will end this article with a link to
Blue Skies. It isn’t my favorite version, but that’s the point. Going forward, there is plenty of room in which people can select their own.
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