Newsletter
T-Mobile has been recently surrounded by a lot of controversy, with numerous issues such as being accused of blatantly lying to its numerous customers and a strong rumor pointing at the company being eventually purchased by Comcast or Charter in the near future. Today, the Un-carrier has made an new contentious public announcement, in which the company expressed how cable companies are not giving true-to-life test results for LTE-U specifications, as they completely rely on “parameters set at extremes that do not represent realistic deployments or do not reflect actual LTE-U specifications” T-Mobile’s Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray, noted in a meeting with FCC Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) and Wireless Telecommunication Bureau (WTB) members. During the meeting, Ray also commented that the company is still planning to begin the trials for LTE-U in 2016, but with realistic results that will not be controlled in any way by unrealistic parameters.
LTE-U stands for LTE in unlicensed spectrum, and is a relatively new technology developed originally by Qualcomm. This technology allows users to use unlicensed spectrums like the 5 GHz band found in dual-band Wi-Fi devices, with the 4G LTE radio. The main purpose of the LTE-U technology, is to work as an alternative to carrier Wi-Fi, which is why T-Mobile is so enthusiastic about the technology. The test results that have been released so far, have shown that LTE-U holds a great potential, but with the new claims by T-Mobile that the parameters under which they have been done create a bit of uncertainty between the tech community. “While cable companies defend these tests by noting that carriers have the ability to adjust LTE-U parameters, the ability to adjust parameters allows a carrier to refine operations based on the environment — a result that will promote equitable sharing,” T-Mobile said during the meeting with the FCC OET and WTB.
T-Mobile’s main intention behind pointing out the unrealistic test results in its competitors LTE-U is to give the FCC a heads up about other companies not taking a neutral approach to the technology in contrast to the FCC’s own stance, praising how the entity’s approach is the right one and pointing out that there sin absolutely no need to deviate from that.