SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the chewing-through-my-data-plan-that-much-faster dept.
SpallsHurgenson writes "Steve Perlman is ready to give you a personal cell phone signal that follows you from place to place, a signal that's about 1,000 times faster than what you have today because you needn't share it with anyone else.
"It's a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook," says Perlman. The technology is now called pCell - short for "personal cell" - and it allows streaming video and other data to phones with a speed and a smoothness you're unlikely to achieve over current cell networks.
Perlman's invention - formerly known as DIDO - discards the current arrangement of cells shared by many users, giving each phone its own tiny cell, a bubble of signal that goes wherever the phone goes. This "personal cell" provides just as much network bandwidth as today's cells, Perlman says, but you needn't share the bandwidth with anyone else. The result is a significantly faster signal."
(Score: 5, Informative) by xtronics on Sunday February 23 2014, @04:45AM
Sounds like good old beam forming with some new hype phrases.
Yes you can improve things - no you can't without trade-offs. You would basically need a huge array of antenna's at each cell site - and you can still have problems with congestion.
This is not new technology - just new hype.
If you are interested, look at some of the wifi AP that use beam forming - it works to a point, but at a cost.
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:32AM
I would have thought most improvements in throughput were going to come from releasing the radio spectrum that analogue TV used to occupy, and that this is where most of the gains are. No one is going to want fatter uglier phone towers.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.