A conversation with Steve Hratko, director of service provider marketing, Ruckus Wireless
Download a transcript of the complete interview and the complete report.
There are two dimensions that are crucial to the deployment and success of LTE in the 5 GHz unlicensed band: spectrum and site acquisition. Through its background in Wi-Fi, Ruckus Wireless is very familiar with both unlicensed spectrum and the needs of businesses and venues and intends to leverage this expertise to ensure that spectrum utilization in the 5 GHz band is fair to current and future tenants.
Steve Hratko, director of service provider marketing at Ruckus Wireless, sees listen-before-talk mechanisms as crucial to provide access of mobile operators to the enterprise. “An operator proposing to install LAA-LTE-enabled small cells with listen before talk will have a much easier time passing muster with that stadium, with that convention center, with that airport.”
But, according to Hratko, it is not LTE unlicensed, but LTE Wi-Fi aggregation that “will prove to be a stronger solution than running LTE directly over the unlicensed band. … Rather than try to put a 5 GHz unlicensed radio inside an LTE small cell, you’ll have Wi-Fi access points running in the unlicensed band, and you’ll have LTE small cells running in the licensed band. You let each of them do what they do best.”
Read the full interview to find more of Ruckus’ views on how LTE unlicensed can coexist with Wi-Fi and about how LTE Wi-Fi aggregation may provide an alternative to LTE unlicensed that operators may find more attractive and easier to use.
This conversation is included in the Senza Fili report “LTE Unlicensed and Wi-Fi: Moving Beyond Coexistence”. If you would like to receive a complimentary copy of the report, please click here to download.
