4G to Be Left in the Dust by New Technology

When it comes to the networks on which our devices run, no speed is ever really too fast. No amount of bandwidth is ever too much for our ever-increasing demands, with gaming and streaming video and telepresence and a hundred other such technologies competing for attention and use in our everyday lives. But a new development is about to turn up the heat on the wireless network, and leave 4G—already a pretty fast piece of work in its own right—in the dust.

The technology in question, being developed by a new startup by the name of Artemis, is known as pCell, a new wireless standard that looks to outclass 4G by a substantial quantity, assuming everything goes as projected. Indeed, some are noting some “hype and uncertainty” around the technology, so while the projections may not turn out to match reality, there's certainly quite a bit of potential for this technology to turn in some impressive results.

Basically, pCell is operating on the principal that cell towers as we know same today are going about the matter of providing connectivity all wrong. A cell tower operates almost like throwing a rock into a pond; the strongest reception is right where the rock dropped, but the farther out from the center one goes, the weaker the resulting waves, which represent the signal. Said towers also have to be placed in a certain way: too close together and the towers interfere with each other, too far apart and the data use can bog down a tower.

The pCell system, however, instead decentralizes the operation. Instead of one big tower, it instead depends on hundreds of smaller towers about the size of computer routers. Dubbed “pWaves,” the boxes in question offer service to a smaller area, but with much improved quality by taking advantage of the collisions between radio waves. The pCell system combines the incoming signals from the pWave base stations to produce a system that essentially offers LTE at full bars, all the time, and having “good” signal strength in the pCell system is a signal that's as much as 1,000 times faster than 4G. Perhaps best of all, pCell is specifically designed with current LTE devices in mind, so users won't need to get new phones.

But it will be some time before pCell is available in any range; the initial launch is set for San Francisco, and not until the fourth quarter of 2014. Artemis' CEO claims that all major markets will have access to this technology by the end of 2015, and other markets likely to follow, but that's a claim that's raising skeptical eyebrows on several fronts. After all, established infrastructure like towers aren't going to be quickly taken down for a comparatively new technology.

But this technology isn't exactly without precedent, either. It sounds, at least on the surface, similar to small cell technology, the benefits of which many companies are discovering. Though the tech itself powering these may be different, the concept is essentially the same: bring out several smaller transmitters to boost bandwidth and offer more speed in more places, instead of having one big transmitter involved. While it may take longer to roll out than some expect, the idea of multiple small transmitters that work with interference instead of seek to avoid it isn't a bad idea, and one that really ought to have great effect when it's fully operating.