Dev.SN

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."