Although the promise of 5G is both expansive and highly attractive, commercial deployments at significant volume and coverage still remain more than a year away and many markets will not see the technology widely deployed for at least five years. Therefore LTE is the reality in many markets for the foreseeable future.
That’s no bad thing because a lot of the opportunities that can be addressed with 5G are also addressable utilising LTE and associated technologies such as LTE-Advanced. LTE is at least adequate for many new services and for several applications, notably those in the Internet of Things, LTE provides greater capacity than is required.
There are substantial opportunities for organisations – not just cellular operators – to deploy LTE networks (subject to licensing) in support of their applications and services.
There are offerings to help organisations get started quickly with LTE and to enable operators to rapidly upgrade from 2G or 3G to LTE. Learn how to deploy LTE rapidly by reading the paper: Aricent LTE in a Box
In addition, precious LTE spectrum can be conserved by handing off traffic to Wi-Fi, relieving potential network congestion and enabling the user experience to be preserved. Learn how Wi-Fi can be utilised to augment LTE capacity and deliver a better user experience here.
In the excitement over 5G Wi-Fi has been talked about less but technological advances have made it more applicable than ever with voice-over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) now providing a high quality experience that further enables Wi-Fi to augment cellular capacity.
