Another week, another industry alliance, but the significant expansion of the LTE-B Alliance is interesting because it reflects two important trends. One is the diversification of LTE. Operators talk about the need for 5G to support multiple use cases optimally, even when they have very different network requirements. This will eventually be achieved through software-defined networks and slicing, but before all that becomes real, LTE is making a few steps towards supporting optimized performance for use cases which behave differently from the core mobile broadband activity. So, NB-IoT is an LTE implementation for machine-to-machine apps; LTE-U and LTE-LAA, for unlicensed spectrum, are focused heavily on indoor and enterprise density; LTE-B supports multicast and broadcast over 4G. In all cases, the…