Pushes for Standards Review of LTE-U Coexistence Really Attempt at Stifling Competition, CTIA Says

LTE-U Forum backers and 3GPP allies continue to duke it out before the FCC. CTIA fired back Thursday at complaints that efforts to ensure coexistence between LTE-unlicensed and Wi-Fi are being partially hijacked. Those calls "for a formal standards review upends the permissionless innovation that is the hallmark of unlicensed spectrum policy," CTIA said in a submission in docket 15-105.

The agency should instead reiterate its position on technology neutrality for the unlicensed bands, CTIA said. CTIA also repeated what has been a common talking point for LTE-U backers: that its coexistence-based design "makes it a good neighbor to Wi-Fi -- often better than Wi-Fi is to itself" (see 1509100035). That "coexistence-by-design" for LTE-U and the "listen-before-talk" protocol employed in licensed assisted access "are just two ways in which coexistence can be accomplished" by the two types of unlicensed LTE, CTIA said. It said the push by NCTA and others "is nakedly anti-competitive and contravenes FCC rules and practices."

The CTIA filing was directed at comments from Google, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, NCTA and a variety of Wi-Fi companies (see 1510220028). They had said that, contrary to the industry-developed 802.11 standards that have made Wi-Fi successful, "the leading proponents of LTE-U have taken the opposite approach ... press[ing] forward unilaterally to deploy their own non-standardized form of unlicensed LTE in the United States." While not making any specific proposals, NCTA et al. said the FCC "should carefully scrutinize this conduct."

In its filing Thursday, CTIA said any standards-setting review "is no panacea" guaranteeing coexistence between LTE-U and Wi-Fi, since even Wi-Fi has no coexistence testing specification, only the listen before talk protocol. The NCTA comments are aimed at keeping a status quo "in 'their' (unlicensed) spectrum [as they] preclude new, innovative competitive developments," CTIA said. And CTIA said the LTE-U Forum and its supporters have done extensive outreach both formally and informally to the Wi-Fi world on coexistence issues. NCTA, Verizon, which is a chief founder of LTE-Forum, and Qualcomm, which also is a major proponent of LTE-U, didn't comment Thursday.

Ruckus Wireless, among submitters of the NCTA comments, "supports continued innovation in the unlicensed bands, including the introduction of LTE to those bands," it said in a statement. "We also support Chairman Wheeler’s view that an open, broad-based, standards-setting process is critical in order for this introduction to be successful. For this reason, we favor the LAA and LWA programs being developed as features for LTE Release 13 within the consensus-based standard-setting process of 3GPP. We are also encouraged by the liaison and communication that has occurred between 3GPP and IEEE on the LAA program as it pertains to Wi-Fi coexistence, and hope that this cooperation will continue in the months leading up to the completion of Release 13.”