A year ago, when the Wireless Broadband Alliance announced its Vision 2020 program, it was moving away from a specific focus on Wi-Fi and towards a far broader platform based around many unlicensed spectrum bands and technologies. This recognized the fundamental and exciting role that unlicensed spectrum will play in pushing the boundaries of wireless experience and business cases between now and 2020; and in the platform that becomes “5G.”
Unlicensed spectrum technologies have come a long way from being the disruptive younger sibling of the licensed-band networks to having an equal place at the table. Indeed, this year’s upcoming WBA report looks beyond unlicensed spectrum on its own and towards the rising levels of convergence with licensed technologies to enable new performance levels and flexibility for service providers of all kinds.
Coexistence, and increasingly, full network convergence will drive the next generation of wireless technologies, along with some key enablers of the heterogeneous network – network virtualization, new management techniques such as self-optimizing networks, flexible approaches to spectrum licensing and aggregation.
Without network convergence, the “internet of things,” the hyper-dense network and indeed 5G will not be economic or even practical. These are three cornerstones of new emerging business cases for wireless service providers, whether mobile operators, pure-play Wi-Fi, machine-to-machine operators or wireline carriers with a wireless element to their platforms. All of them will depend on different unlicensed technologies coming together and often working with licensed networks. For instance, for the IoT more than two-thirds of operators expect to deploy two or more different technologies in parallel.
Network convergence will enable or enhance many business cases, which rely on massive IoT connectivity or on hyper-dense data networks. Many of these will be seen in the context of the smart city, a key area of focus and activity for the WBA in 2016, and this year’s report devotes a full section to the massive potential of these environments to drive social and economic improvements, and in so doing to influence future wireless technology roadmaps.
Those roadmaps will lead eventually to 5G – not just a radio upgrade, but an end-to-end platform spanning the core to the edge of the network, and a top-to-bottom one from the radio to the applications layer. Current developments in the Wi-Fi market, including the next wave of 802.11 standards and moves towards virtualization, will feed into this new platform alongside those from the cellular and M2M worlds. The result will be a flexible, radio-neutral 5G environment in which a whole new generation of business models will be able to thrive in unlicensed as well as licensed spectrum, building on a long history of innovation in the Wi-Fi community.
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