As wireless carriers continue to struggle with maintaining network integrity in the face of growing consumer demand, the move towards offloading some data traffic through unlicensed Wi-Fi connections has gained steam.
A number of carriers have announced Wi-Fi initiatives designed to provide additional capacity and coverage in dense locations and venues where traditional cellular networks and limited spectrum capacity have made it difficult to provide an acceptable level of service quality. However, challenges remain in that carriers are still unable to provide a seamless handoff experience between their cellular networks and a Wi-Fi connection, requiring a customer’s device to re-establish a connection when roaming between the two services.
This is not considered to be a significant issue at the moment as this hard handoff generally results in just a slight blip in a customer’s data session, but as carriers begin to rely on their data networks to carry voice traffic, the disconnect will become readily apparent.
There is also the issue that carriers tend to lose track of a customer’s experience once they move off of the cellular network and onto a public Wi-Fi connection.
The wireless industry is working on a number of initiatives designed to ease the handoff between licensed and unlicensed networks, including the Hotspot 2.0 initiative coming from the Wi-Fi Alliance as well as the access network discovery and selection function (ANDSF) spearheaded by the 3GPP standards body.
Looking to provide more clarity into the space, RCR Wireless News spoke with Vanja Subotic, senior manager of solutions management at InterDigital to glean some insight into how the market for Wi-Fi offloading is evolving and where InterDigital sees the space heading. Hint: InterDigital sees more opportunity for carriers from the ANDSF standard.
Subotic also provided a bit of color on the growing momentum surrounding plans for “5G” services, which will look to take over the marketing hype currently dominated by “4G.” While a 5G standard is still in the works, there is already talk of what may be included, such as denser networks, use of spectrum at higher frequencies, and devices with hundreds of antennas that can operate on those higher frequencies.
Of course, the International Telecommunications Union may have something to say on the matter as it’s the official international agency that sets standards for the various generations of wireless technology. Current standards require the deployment of LTE-Advanced or WirelessMAN-Advanced to meet the definition of 4G, something that has yet to actually happen despite the best wishes of marketers.
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