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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: 1) by Luke on Monday February 24 2014, @09:37AM
VoLTE sounds interesting, I'll need to look it up as I've not heard any plans to introduce it here in NZ, the best we get is plain old 900Mhz GSM/UMTS.
Certainly GSM (that I use) has the dropout problem, not to mention the 35km (or 70km) range limit regardless of signal strength. UMTS would require a new telephone and they just don't make what I'd be prepared to use [large, inexpensive with no 'smart' facilites] but it would get around the absolute range limit, although I expect there'd still be the dropout and audio quality issue.
Despite the VoLTE QoS you mention I'm not sure it would completely deal with the latter, have you direct experience of it?
FYI our AMPS frequency here was 800Mhz, I'm not sure what the DAMPS was, possibly the same. Presently digital occupies at least the 900/1800Mhz bands, the latter of course is worse for range, particularly around hills. I think there's been some further spectrum sales to the Telco's recently so there'll be a few more blocks in use shortly.