Senza Fili Consulting President Monica Paolini breaks down LTE-U, LAA and other issues from Mobile World Congress 2016
After her well-received presentation during the Small Cell Summit event, colocated with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, RCR Wireless News caught up with Monica Paolini, president of Senza Fili Consulting, to get her perspective on the operative issues surrounding LTE-U, cellular in unlicensed spectrum.
Paolini commented on LTE-U flavor licensed-assisted access, which requires an anchor tenant deployed in licensed spectrum, as well as MultiFire, which, while not necessarily an operator solution, removes in the need for the licensed anchor tenant.
“This is a very interesting topic that has received huge amounts of attention … in terms of the arguments behind it,” Paolini said. “What it is is about LTE as an air interface being able to work in an unlicensed band. From a mobile operator point of view, the unlicensed band is a band that you can use in different interfaces and different solutions.”
“LTE-U is the first one that has been promoted in addition to Wi-Fi,” Paolini explained. “That’s an interesting case because you have LTE … that can be used regardless of what else is going on in the channel pretty much. When you do that, you obviously disrupt Wi-Fi. It’s not desirable not just for the people that want to use Wi-Fi,” but also for the operator that deployed Wi-Fi.
Quality of experience
With the near singular emphasis on “5G” during Mobile World Congress, Paolini stressed operator’s can do lots of things today that will improve network experience while allowing for innovative new services.
“There has been a lot of attention on 5G, everybody talks about 5G,” Paolini said. “There is a lot of marketing effort to pack everything that is new under the 5G label. In a way that doesn’t do a good service to the innovation that’s going on. There’s a lot of work that’s being done in parallel.”
Vendors and operators “are much more pressed to solve needs, concerns that they have today. One of them that’s really coming to the fore is [quality of experience],” Paolini added. “There’s nothing new there, but they’re becoming more and more aware of the complexity of making those subscribers happy. In a voice environment, it’s easy. When you have multiple data applications, what makes a subscriber happy, it’s difficult to capture, changes depending on where you are, changes on what device you have. It’s a real challenge.”
