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.
Perlman — the iconic Silicon Valley inventor best known for selling his web TV company to Microsoft for half a billion dollars — started work on this new-age cellular technology a decade ago, and on Wednesday morning, he’ll give the first public demonstration at Columbia University in New York, his alma mater. Previously known as DIDO, the technology is now called pCell — short for “personal cell” — and judging from the demo Perlman gave us at his lab in San Francisco last week, it works as advertised, streaming video and other data to phones with a speed and a smoothness you’re unlikely to achieve over current cell networks.
“It’s a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook,” says Perlman, who also helped Apple create QuickTime, the technology that brought video to the Macintosh. “Since the invention of wireless, people have moved around the coverage area. Now, the coverage area follows you.”
‘It’s a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook. Since the invention of wireless, people have moved around the coverage area. Now, the coverage area follows you’
— Steve Perlman
Working under the aegis of a new company called Artemis Research — a mythological reference meant to paint pCell as a “moon shot” — Perlman is intent on pushing his new technology into major American cities and beyond. He says the first prototype network could launch as soon as the four quarter of this year. Some believe the technology could very well remake the wireless industry, but as with any moon shot, there are obstacles aplenty.
The project would involve installing entirely new wireless antennas atop buildings and towers across the country, as well as slipping new cards into our phones. Perlman says he’s already in discussions with some of the world’s largest wireless carriers and handset designers about the technology, but if history is a guide, the Verizons and the AT&Ts — who are still upgrading their networks to the relatively new LTE wireless technology — will be slow to make the move, if they make it at all.
“In business, there is money in scarcity,” says Richard Doherty, director of a technology consulting firm called Envisioneering, who has closely followed Perlman’s project. “The wireless business models of today are based on scarcity. Opening up the floodgates for any service, for any carrier, has tremendous implications. In our experiences working with carriers…they like to have everything defined on their terms, to have breakthroughs arrive when they want them to.”
The New Cell
One thing’s for sure: the idea is a complete departure from the current way of doing things, the sort of invention Perlman is known for. His San Francisco lab is called Rearden — a nod to Hank Rearden, the fictional magnate in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged who invents an alloy that’s stronger than steel — and this tiny tech incubator is always looking for ways of overturning the status quo. It has already given rise to OnLive, a service that lets you streams game and other software over the internet rather than installing it on local devices, and Mova, which helped transform movie and game effects by providing a means of digitally capturing facial expressions, and now, it hopes to turn the wireless industry on its head.
With today’s networks, each antenna — perched atop a building or tower — creates a massive “cell” of wireless signal. This is essentially an enormous cone of radio waves that spans several city blocks, and it’s shared by all phones in the area. But Perlman’s invention discards the arrangement, 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.
“Everybody gets a little cell, that’s about a centimeter in size, around your phone. That gives you incredible density. Everyone gets the full spectrum of the channel in one centimeter of space,” explains Perlman, who often reminds us of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, not only with his enthusiasm for his craft, but with the way he punctuates his arguments with a rhetorical “Right?” — almost an insistence that you see things his way.
Like Pebbles Dropped in the Pond
In many ways, pCell is a mind-bending technology. Though it provides a personal cell for each phone, it doesn’t require a greater number of antennas. Unlike today’s antennas, Perlman’s radios can work in concert to focus signals on individual phones.
With current wireless networks, each antenna operates mostly alongside the others, as opposed to working in tandem with them. In fact, if you put two antennas too close, they’ll interfere with each other and degrade your signal. But, working hand-in-hand with principal scientist Antonio Forenza and other Rearden engineers, Perlman has developed a new type of antenna that uses signal interference to its advantage. With pCell, interference actually enhances a signal, with multiple waves combining to form even stronger waves. “You can locate the radio heads wherever you want them, rather than where it’s convenient to put them,” Perlman says, “and they all transmit in such a way that there’s huge overlap…creating an extremely high-performance signal”
Pieter van Rooyen — an inventor and former professor who has closely followed the progress of the project — compares this phenomenon to that old game where you drop two pebbles in a pond, each creates circular waves that spread out across the water, and, in some places, the waves combine to create another, stronger wave. What Perlman and his colleagues have done, van Rooyen explains, is create a system where waves combine like this at the very point where your cell phone is located. “Around the mobile phone, the waves add to each other,” he says, “and everywhere else, the waves cancel each other out.”
The system can target your phone in this way because the device is constantly sending out its own wireless signals. And, Perlman say, the system can target myriad devices in the same area. Inside his Rearden lab, he showed us the technology streaming video to eight different iPhones sitting almost on top of each other.
‘Five Bars Everywhere’
It was certainly an impressive demonstration. Perlman and his team even streamed ultra-high-definition “4K” video to massive flat screens, showing that the bandwidth provided by the technology can take us beyond what we can currently do on our phones. But perhaps more importantly, Perlman aims to ensure that today’s phones simply work as you expect them to — that calls aren’t dropped and texts aren’t delayed, that you never hit a dead zone, that you can still use the network when an emergency hits and thousands of people jump on at once. “If AT&T adopts it and turns it on in San Francisco ,” Perlman says. “Everywhere I go, I get five bars and I can stream HD video on an iPad.”
That’s something most of us would like to see. The question is whether Perlman can get the major carriers or other deep-pocketed outfits to install the necessary infrastructure. Perlman says the technology has an advantage because it works works with existing cell phones, and he tells us that “every major carrier and platform maker is circling us, all to see if they can have it.” But phones will require new SIM cards, the tiny removable circuit cards that control a phone’s connection to a network. And more to the point, it will require a whole new world of antennas. These antennas are relatively small, but rolling them out would still require an enormous capital investment — an investment the big carriers are unlikely to make any time soon.
But even someone like Richard Doherty, who questions whether the big carriers will embrace the technology in the near future, believes that pCell will shake up the industry in one way or another. “This is not just a breakthrough technology. It can both empower and upset many established industries,” Doherty says, “This is a story we’ll all be watching for weeks and months to come.”
