Consumers are only beginning to use LTE in unlicensed spectrum. So far chatter has mostly been about operator trials, commercial chipsets and sales of devices to seed the market before anyone is to be able to use the new service feature. Nevertheless, the commercial impact will be quite dramatic within a few years.
Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) was introduced in 3GPP release 13, March 2016, as part of LTE Advanced Pro. LAA uses carrier aggregation in the downlink to combine LTE in unlicensed spectrum (i.e., at 5 GHz for now) with LTE in licensed bands. The additional capacity provides faster data rates and a more responsive user experience.
