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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: 2, Insightful) by davester666 on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:00AM
Sure, except...
1) this only affects transmitting from the cell tower to the cell phone. The cell phone still transmits at the same speed as before, with bandwidth shared by all the phones in the area.
2) good luck with getting 3-5 antennae to generate thousands of these couple of cm diameter super-reception-bubbles around each cell phone antennae, and then move those bubbles in real-time to follow each antennae around as it moves in a semi-random path.
Theoretically it's possible, with each cell tower having a bunch of directional antennae, and some really powerful computers, and some new cell phone locating technology that works in 3d down to ~1cm more than probably 10 times a second [because lots of phones are in motion somewhere between 2 and 60 mph.
Actually, at 60 mph, your phone moves 88 feet/sec, so the location would have to updated more than 100 times/second.
Sounds like this system is at least 6 months away from widespread implementation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mrbluze on Sunday February 23 2014, @05:21AM
Well actually.. NBN in Australia is for fixed wireless (wireless to the home). This could obviate the need for buried optical fibres in low density areas.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 1) by sjames on Monday February 24 2014, @01:42AM
The same technology can control the sensitivity when receiving a signal so the speedup should be bi-directional. It probably won't work well on moving targets unless their motion is quite predictable. It will be quite a computational challenge to serve many [phones at once.