MulteFire

I am interested if anyone has thought about the value of MulteFire for the WISP community.

If you are not familiar check out https://www.multefire.org

MulteFire is a LBT technology that allows LTE to exhist in unlicensed spectrum without a host in licensed specturm.

MulteFire enables fair sharing with Wi-Fi. This potentialy enables an LTE solution like cnRanger to work better when co-located with a Wi-Fi based solution like ePMP3000.

Please join the conversation with your input and ideas.

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MulteFire (LAA) is a way to destroy WISP operation on the 5 GHz band. It means that the licensed FDD LTE downlink is divided between its licensed mobile band and 5 GHz, while the uplink is only on the licensed band. This way there is never interference to the mobile carrier who deploys it, but there is vast and often terrible interference to the WiFi, public safety 5 GHz microwave (something I do), and WISP users in the neighborhood. It shouldn't be legal but unlicensed is unlicensed.

The claim that it doesn't hurt WiFi is disingenuous. In a lab setting, where a lot of indoor WiFi access points are put in a room with an LAA transmitter, the LAA transmitter will punctuate (pause) its transmissions every once in a while to allow the asynchronous WiFi to transmit a little, if the WiFi is loud enough (like in the room). This of course does not work well at all in conjunction with synchronous transmission protocols like, say, Cambium 450 or ePMP. Nor with LTE using a different time scheuler than the MulteFire, which works with FDD, while cnRanger is generally TDD.

Qualcomm, of course, would like WISPs and WiFI to both go away so that its big mobile-carrier customers can migrate everything onto technology that Qualcomm claims patent royalties for.

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From what I'm reading this MulteFire is designed as a way for LTE to solely use the 5GHz band as the main carrier, instead of other 5GHz LTE designs that require a licensed band to act as an anchor before 5ghz is dynamically used for carrier aggregation.

In any case... if Cambium was an LTE only company, and I was dead set on only deploying LTE, this might be mildly interesting to me... but Cambium already has a bunch of really nicely performing 5GHz systems with price points that are significantly lower then anything I could imagine could be built on an LTE platform.

Would this be used for an in building micro/pico cell or something like that?

@fgoldstein I was not aware that it was that poorly designed to work in a TDD environment. Thanks for the feedback