According to the Commission, 71 percent of wireless data traffic flowing to and from mobile devices in the EU last year flowed over Wi-Fi, and that number is expected to hit 78 percent by 2016. Considering that the total traffic will itself increase a great deal over that time, that’s a lot of Wi-Fi usage we’re talking about.
If you’ve got a device that uses the 802.11n or 802.11ac Wi-Fi standards, chances are it can use 5GHz instead of the 2.4GHz band traditionally used for Wi-Fi. At the moment, 5GHz Wi-Fi is still pretty sparsely used outside of public Wi-Fi networks, but the authors of the study (J. Scott Marcus of WIK-Consult and John Burns of Aegis Systems) noted that the 5GHz band could get crowded in the long term “if rates of traffic growth persist as we project”.
The solution, the authors claimed, would be to free up the bits of the 5GHz band that aren’t already available in Europe. In line with the FCC plans over in the U.S., they recommended freeing up the 5350-5470MHz and 5850-5925MHz bands – they also pointed to the 5725-5850MHz band, which is already used in the U.S. but not in Europe.
WiFiNovation's insight:
In total, the authors made three recommendations that the Commission seems keen to carry forward: to free up that 5GHz spectrum; to look into future licensing options for the 3.5GHz band; and to make it less of a pain for carriers to set up Wi-Fi offload services in public locations.
Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes praised the report, while also giving a shout out to Wi-Fi-sharing community Fon
via WiFiNovation | Scoop.it More READ
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