T-Mobile Plans LTE Over Wi-Fi for 2016

BARCELONA—T-Mobile is thinking ahead. How far ahead? Well, along with Qualcomm and Alcatel-Lucent, it just announced it will start rolling out LTE over 5GHz in 2016.

We wrote about this technology last week, when Qualcomm announced its chips. The LTE-U technology, also known as LAA, will take unused spectrum in the 5GHz Wi-Fi band and turn it over to carriers on an ad-hoc basis, to improve their LTE coverage in buildings and dense urban areas.

Qualcomm and Alcatel-Lucent say that they'll run trials in the second half of this year, with commercial products coming in early 2016. The news here is that T-Mobile is stepping up to deploy the technology, the new chips are ready, it appears.

T-Mobile's network team has a history of being on the bleeding edge of new technologies. MetroPCS was the first carrier in the U.S. to deploy LTE, and many of the folks who worked on that now work at T-Mobile. MetroPCS was also the first carrier in the world with narrowband LTE and LTE/CDMA, both of which take some tricks. T-Mobile, meanwhile, was at the vanguard of HSPA+ 42.

LTE-U will take new phones, but with a 2016 rollout plan, that isn't too much of a worry. It'll also probably be included in new Qualcomm chipsets, as Qualcomm is a key partner here.

The question then is how this rollout will come together. It's expensive and invasive to build LTE-U networks, so they'll probably start out in places like office buildings, hotels, university campuses, and convention centers where there tends to be a lot of LTE usage in a small, enclosed area.

If the first LTE-U devices arrive in 2016, it'll be that year's Galaxies and iPhones that have the technology, so it'll really be 2017 before we see this speeding up most T-Mobile LTE phones.