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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: 5, Informative) by Luke on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:33AM
As a rural dweller I would be much more interested in 1000x the range.
My old analogue 'brick' was much more successful at maintaining calls than any other digital telephone I've ever had. In my view it's time the poor call quality, range and dropouts were sorted ahead of anything else - personally I use my telephone to make old-fashioned voice calls and nothing else (actually it's elderly, just like me, and won't do anything else).
/grumpyoldfart
(Score: 4, Informative) by rogueippacket on Sunday February 23 2014, @09:42AM
Your point is entirely valid, but your old 1G analog brick phone worked so well for two reasons - first, there was little or no contention for spectrum. User density was low, and the spectrum available to you was almost entirely for voice traffic. Second, 1G networks were built using lower blocks of spectrum, 150 MHz and up. As soon as 2G was rolled out, calls became digital and ran over the 450 MHz band. The result would be an improvement in call quality and consistency (either it worked or it didn't) to those within range of the tower, but an absolutely abysmal experience for those at the edge.
We just had our 700 MHz auction in Canada for exactly this reason, with the intent to offer converged voice and data using Voice over LTE (VoLTE) with extremely stringent QoS to ensure your voice calls succeed over the guy streaming Netflix next door. It isn't 1G analog, but these changes are directly targeted at rural users.
(Score: 2, Funny) by demonlapin on Sunday February 23 2014, @01:13PM
(Score: 1) by Luke on Monday February 24 2014, @05:41AM
Actually the Motorola 'brick' I typically used was around 0.5 or 1w IIRC, the bagphone (or carphone) was 3W with a better antenna and correspondingly better range.
Usefully I had several of them with the same (cloned) ESN and so if I lost or broke one I could just grab another - not so easy if you lose your SIM card today...
(Score: 1) by Luke on Monday February 24 2014, @05:37AM
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.