OTI Applauds Senate Committee Letter Asking FCC to Protect Consumer Use of Wi-Fi

WASHINGTON,
DC — Today
six members of the Senate Commerce Committee, led by Sen. Brian Schatz
(D-Hawaii), sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom
Wheeler calling on the agency to proactively initiate a process to ensure that
mobile carrier LTE-U technology will not disrupt consumer use of Wi-Fi on
unlicensed spectrum bands.

In May
the Commission released a Public Notice seeking comment on a new mobile carrier
technology, in particular LTE Unlicensed (LTE-U), that T-Mobile and Verizon
have announced they intend to deploy on unlicensed bands currently used by
Wi-Fi. New America’s Open Technology
Institute filed comments, along with other national
consumer organizations, warning about the potential disruptive impact of LTE-U,
a technology that uses unlicensed spectrum but does not incorporate the
fair-sharing protocols (e.g., listen-before-talk, exponential back-off) that
allow many Wi-Fi users to coexist and re-use unlicensed spectrum intensively.

The following statement can be attributed to Michael Calabrese, director of the Wireless
Future Project at New America’s Open Technology Institute: 

“We applaud Senator Schatz and his
Commerce Committee colleagues for taking the lead on an issue that is
vital to affordable broadband and mobile market competition, and therfore beneficial to
consumers. Our consumer coalition has told the FCC we fear mobile carriers have
both the ability and strong incentives to use LTE-U as an anti-competitive
counterattack against Wi-Fi as a carrier substitute.

“Carriers have powerful incentives to
use LTE-U to deter mobile market competition from “Wi-Fi First” providers, such
as cable companies and Google. Even
without blocking Wi-Fi, carriers can use LTE-U to introduce just enough packet
delay to frustrate consumer use of real-time applications, such as video
calling. Carriers can also for the first time use LTE-U to force consumers to
pay them for the use of the unlicensed spectrum that powers Wi-Fi today.

“The Senators are correct that the FCC
needs to initiate and lead a process that results in coexistence standards and
preserves unlicensed bands as a commons equally useful to all Americans.”