The pCell concept which threatens to turn cellular communication on its head, was unleashed almost precisely a year ago. This week it is back with its pre-Mobile World Congress publicity stunts, to attract serious meetings at the Barcelona event. But the question marks over the technology raised last time, more from ignorance than serious doubts, seem to have already been fully answered. The technology is shown in a video this week which looked like something out of the Crime Drama “The Mentalist,” delivering what we all know to be impossible, some 800 Mbps of data in a 20 Mhz piece of spectrum, achieving a spectral efficiency claimed to be 35 times that of LTE. We’re not sure but could we hear a few people “gasping” in awe in the background?
At Faultline we always believed Steve Perlman, Artemis founder and CEO, last time around, but wondered how he would bring the technology to market, and whether or not there would be sufficient bumps on that road to slow pCell development down so that it would fail to leapfrog LTE, LTE Advanced and 5G.
The big issue is not the science, but getting people to believe that his team had cracked all of the design issues. Now Perlman has leased spectrum from Dish Networks in and around San Francisco to put on demonstrations, brought his devices to market and is offering an arena solution to connect tens of thousands of cellphones in an arena, at a fraction of the expense of existing arena systems. That should attract keen interest from rival arena solutions providers, especially Cisco and Ericsson.
There are more pCell systems planned with VenueNext, at live venues, working with existing devices, but they do need a specialized SIM to authenticate to these temporary networks, but we presume these will be given away or sold at the arena entrances.
Perlman is great at demos, not so good at running companies and if the pCell gets out of fantasy and laboratories and into product, he should be replaced as soon as possible. He ran the fated Onlive cloud gaming business and brought the technology to market, but then it ran out of runway and never quite took off. The company was acquired out of bankruptcy by Lauder Partners, an investment firm run by Gary Lauder, of ActiveVideo fame, and Perlman didn’t even retain a shareholding.
It seems that Perlman can speak to PhD students about technology, but he’s not so hot at talking to business men about route to market strategies, which was where our concerns over the pCell came from.
But in convincing Dish to part with spectrum for two years, perhaps with an option to buy the resulting network, and VenueNext, which has been helping out on infrastructure at the Levi Stadium of the San Francisco 49ers, these are credible technology business, which appear to have been convinced. The first pCell service will be deployed in San Francisco subject to FCC approval.
The pCell team has also released a White Paper, not only detailing the radical approach to wireless that enables pCell’s breakthrough performance results, but for the first time shares practical details about pCell deployment and operational costs from pCell trials, as well as the first disclosed details of future LTE-spectrum compatible pCell technology, such as multi-gigabit, sub-millisecond latency services.
Rather than avoiding interference like conventional wireless technologies, pCell technology exploits interference, combining interfering radio waves to create an unshared personal cell (a “pCell”) for each LTE device, providing the full wireless capacity to each user at once, even in extremely high density situations.
“pCell solves the core challenge for venues in the mobile era: supporting skyrocketing data demand at high user densities,” said John Paul, CEO and Founder of VenueNext. “We’re excited to trial pCell, to not only provide reliable broadband service to every seat in the house, but to enable a new era of venue applications and services that would not be possible with conventional wireless technology.”
The Artemis I Hub is available for venue and indoor trials on a select basis the company said and typically it takes just a day to set up for testing. Since pCell is a pure software-defined radio (SDR) system, everything, including a full LTE implementation and baseband processing is implemented in software on just three servers. The Artemis I Hub connects through coax to up to 32 antennas that can be placed anywhere in the coverage area.
It has to be remembered that Qualcomm came to light when its two founding mathematicians built a CDMA network to “prove” that their Forward Error Correction and modulation schemes actually worked. From there Qualcomm has never looked back and Perlman is following a tried and tested route to potentially huge success.
To use the Artemis pCell service in San Francisco on the Dish-leased spectrum, users insert an Artemis SIM card into an existing LTE device. In the case of new universal SIMs that are just coming on the market, users only need to choose Artemis as their LTE service. Users, when outside San Francisco will roaming using an MVNO scheme.
Let’s see if Perlman can find enough cash to actually build out and bring to market this San Francisco network, and whether or not enough users will adopt it, because if they do this operation will become unstoppable.