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.”