More than 20 years ago at Apple, Steve Perlman helped to create QuickTime, the video software that’s still a foundation technology in every new Mac, iPhone and iPad. He also worked at wireless-device pioneer General Magic and started a bunch of innovative consumer-electronics companies.
For the last decade, he’s been working on a technology called pCell for personal cell which his San Francisco-based wireless company, Artemis Networks.
The technology is designed to overcome a basic problem with existing methods of cellular connections, which make all the wireless-device users in an area compete for bandwidth from one big tower which can result in everybody getting crummy service, especially in crowded urban areas.
pCell takes a different approach: it embraces signal interference. In his vision, base stations smaller than your typical satellite TV antenna are placed wherever it’s convenient (such as on the roof or the side of a building), and their signals purposely overlap. Those overlapping signals, Perlman says, combine constructively to create a sort of personal cell, a centimeter in diameter, which moves with you as you move around the network. The signal doesn’t diminish as each additional user joins the network. Overall capacity can grow by adding more access points.
Perlman says that pCell works with existing LTE devices, and that users won’t notice as they move from a regular cellular access point to a pCell node.
pCell woks like a version of distributed multiuser MIMO technology. MIMO, which stands for “multiple input and multiple output,” is a method of using multiple antennas in a base station and in a receiver (such as a cell phone) to move more data over a network at once.