LIVE FROM HUAWEI GLOBAL ANALYST SUMMIT 2014: Qualcomm touted the opportunity for operators to use LTE-Advanced technology in unlicensed spectrum in order to help tackle capacity issues.

In a presentation yesterday, Jilei Hou (pictured), director of engineering and corporate R&D for Qualcomm in China, said the technology will “have a pronounced impact, a substantial impact” for the industry in the coming years.

He noted that in some markets as much as 5MHz is available in unlicensed bands, which could be used to support telecom operator services.

“What you are doing conceptually is very simple. You do carrier aggregation across two different bands. You deploy an anchor carrier in the licensed band, and meanwhile you bundle it with a supplementary carrier in the unlicensed band. You greatly utilise unlicensed spectrum, in an efficient way”, he said.

Underpinning this is the fact that LTE “provides better performance, efficiency, reliability, compared to Wi-Fi,” he continued.

And with regard to Wi-Fi, Hou said “we are trying with all our partners to make sure we can have a really reliable mechanism in place to make sure Wi-Fi services are not impacted.”