Dramatic changes in LTE landscape bust myths, provide FirstNet with new options

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Those famous words from Dorothy to her dog Toto—after Dorothy believes the two of them were swept away by a cyclone—marked the beginning of an adventurous journey through a fantastical world that bore little resemblance to her simple hometown in the The Wizard of Oz.

Frankly, I hadn’t given this classic story a second thought since seeing the prequel Wicked on stage more than a decade ago. But this single line has been crossing my mind repeatedly since attending the LTE North America show in Dallas several weeks ago, when I—like Dorothy upon entering Oz—was overwhelmed by the remarkable amount of change that the commercial wireless world is experiencing and how many long-held assumptions about the cutthroat industry have been destroyed during the past few years.

Some of the myths that have been shattered include:

Carriers won’t share network infrastructure with competitors: Wireless service providers stopped owning their own towers a long time ago (companies like American Tower and Crown Castle now dominate the space), but they generally maintained separate antenna systems on towers and a similar approach was taken indoors, as well. That’s not the case anymore.

At LTE North America, the indoor-coverage discussion centered on how to implement neutral-host distributed antenna systems (DAS), not whether it was a good idea. And there was a growing sentiment at the show that shared outdoor infrastructure could become more common in the U.S. in the future, based on the success seen with that model in the United Kingdom. Can mutually beneficial sharing arrangements be reached with public safety, particularly in terms of indoor coverage?

Carriers want customers to use their networks exclusively, because that’s how they can charge them an make money: For years, public-safety representatives cited this argument as the reason carriers would not support the development of standards for peer-to-peer communications, which is a staple in the LMR world.

But the reality in today’s world is that the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for bandwidth has carriers looking to offload traffic from their networks whenever possible, because they know that they can’t build networks fast enough to keep up with consumers’ demands. In fact, discussions of 5G—expected as early as 2020—indicate that it is not as much a new technology as it is an integration of existing communications systems, including LTE and Wi-Fi.

A single device can only support a limited number of bands and protocols: It wasn’t that long ago that multiband devices were considered an engineering marvel, with some questioning whether having a device work in more than three bands was feasible. But today’s smartphones support an amazing number of bands, multiple generations of cellular technologies and the “table stakes” capabilities of Bluetooth, satellite location and near-field communication.

In short, if there is an economic case for including functionality in a device, it seems like the technological hurdles to do so can be cleared.

LTE is good for data, but not voice: In just a few short years, LTE has transformed the way people consume data, but voice was not part of the standard initially. Today, consumer-grade high-definition (HD) voice over LTE is being rolled out by carriers throughout the world, and initial audio-quality tests are yielding impressive results. We’re still a year or two from having standard for mission-critical voice over LTE, but its arrival could be transformational to first responders, if the audio quality can be maintained when devices operate in peer-to-peer mode.