Monday, October 25, 2004

Mobile phone rant

"Mobile phones. They are everywhere. So many brands, so many service providers, so many offers, so many new services... Isn't it becoming a bit of over-crowded with moblie phones in here?", you might ask.

Yes, it is. Infact, the number of mobile phones is currently more than the number of wired phones and then some. And they all use the the same spectrum of radio waves alloted for cellular communications.

Some fellow named Marty Cooper was interested in this, and like all researcher with too much data and too much free time, announced a law, not surprisingly named, the "Cooper law", which states that the number of conversations that can be conducted concurrently in the same spectrum has doubled every two-and-a-half years for the past 104 years. By the way, Marty Cooper also happens to be the creator of the Mobile phone.

Now before I take you to wonder land, let me show you around kansas first, Alice.

Assuming that you know the basics of how cells are created, let me tell you how cooper's law has been kept up for so long.

Frequency planning: First off, people created the basic "cell", a hexagonal structure in theory for easily dividing the given area(city, state, county) and at the same time covering the most area with the least uncovered area, than considering the entire area as a single broadcast area. Adjacent cells avoided using and listening to the same radio frequency band, and thus avoided a few bad words in communication, which I will name only once for you: "interference" and "Noise".

Some decades later, as DSP (Digital Signal Processing) technology got better, so did the ability to eliminate the effect of the bad words. People started spliting cells into microcells and pico cells.

Sectorization: Now a single cell can use the same frequency band by spliting a cell into "sectors". Sectors are created by directional antennas, which effectively cuts the cell into three or more sectors. Each sector behaves like a cell.

Now that you've got the low-down of existing cell site architectures, let me take you to Wonderland.

How would you like a dedicated cell site for your mobile phone/laptop?

Enter "Personal Cell Core Technology". Let me lay it all down for you before I continue.

What PCCT acheives is this: Instead of wasting radio energy by broadcasting, the smart antennas can locate a user, target the conversation only to the user. This creates a personal "cell site" for the user and follows the user as he moves around the city. Since there is a personal connection with the user, the cell site can allot the same frequency to many other users in the same cell.
What if all the users, allotted the same frquency, call from the same direction? Will the antenna be able to discriminate their signals correctly?
Yes! Hell, It can even discriminate two users even if they are using the same frequency and just inches apart!

PCCT uses an array of "adaptive smart antennas", developed by ArrayComm.

This magic words behind PCCT are GPS sattellites, "Super amplification" for the correct user and "signal supression" for other users, etc. , all handled by ArrayComm's adaptive algorithm and other intellectual Property.


The implications of noise free, full bandwidth, anywhere online and always online properties of ArrayComm's PCCT didn't go unnoticed. iBurst, an australian broadband company, implemented it as a low cost, high bandwidth technology for mobile phone users. Their service provides an always-on connctivity for laptops and mobile phones at a maximum data transfer rate of 1Mbps! (This is considered 4G by some, but that's a topic for another post). All that at the cost of an ordinary dial-up. No need to wait for other users to get off the network or to wait for a spot where you will be within the base station's range again.

And iBurst also created the "Liberate you laptop" campaign. If u don't have the time for stupid things in life, then don't bother:)

One of Marty Cooper's comment on the objective of the mobile phone comes to my mind:

"When you call a landline, you call a place. But, when you call a cell phone, you call a person."

No comments: