Technology Demo Streams Wireless HD Video

April 10, 2014

Steve Perlman, Artemis Networks founder and CEO, recently went back to his alma mater, Columbia University, to demonstrate the pWave technology that his company and PureWave Networks have been working on together. Ten years in development, the personal cell (pCell) technology is a software-defined radio C-RAN connected through fronthaul to radios distributed throughout the coverage area.

pWave access point

“This is the first major commercially available software-defined radio network. All the cellular networks out there today are working off of dedicated spectrum,” Perlman said. “Each antenna has an IP connection and line-of-site microwave or fiber fronthauls to a data center.”

In one demo, he streamed eight unique HDTV signals to eight iPhones simultaneously on 5 megahertz of spectrum, even though the phones were within millimeters of each other.

In a separate demonstration he streamed two 4,000-pixel resolution (4K) video streams to flat screen TVs and two 1080p HD streams to laptops using 10 megahertz of spectrum.

Instead of users taking turns sharing the capacity of one large cell, each user gets an unshared pCell, giving the full wireless capacity of the spectrum to each user at once, according to the video Perlman showed at the demonstration.

“We can light up every TV in a New York condo with a pCell carrying 4K TV on 10 megahertz of spectrum,” Perlman said. “No one would even think of running LTE on 10 megahertz of spectrum.”

The pCell technology will eliminate the need for cable or DSL hookups in the home, according to Perlman.

“It’s a real revolution in wireless. It is a leapfrog of 5G, which targets live HD streaming by 2020,” he said. “We are delivering on most of the requirements of 5G in 2014 with existing LTE devices.”

Although it was not demonstrated, an Artemis press release said PureWave’s latest generation platform is capable of handling all of the baseband and RF processing for up to two simultaneous sets of 20 megahertz FDD LTE channels spanning multiple bands.

Beyond Cellular Performance with Serendipitous Siting

Unlike cellular systems, which avoid interference, Perlman said the radio signals from pWaves constructively interfere, synthesizing a tiny, 1-centimeter-diameter pCell around the antenna of each off-the-shelf LTE device. That synthetic cell follows the handset around as it moves, and uses only line-of-sight microwave backhaul.

pWave APs can be deployed serendipitously

“It synthesizes a cell at the full performance of what the LTE phone can receive and get uniform performance, wherever the phone is, near or far from the antennas,” Perlman said. “Because pWave radios deliberately interfere with each other, they do not need to be deployed in a specific plan to avoid interference, but rather are deployed serendipitously, wherever it is convenient and there is minimal site and fronthaul cost, whether indoor, outdoor or both.”

With the pCell technology, it doesn’t matter where the antennas are. Perlman said a random layout provides performance similar to the honeycomb layout.

“Even with an arbitrary arrangement of towers, with the pCell you get uniform performance across all the devices,” he said. “As result, each LTE device can utilize the entire spectrum concurrently, even in high user density situations like airports and stadiums.”

Perlman said the company tried to eliminate the inherent risks of introducing a new technology by using the LTE protocol and existing spectrum allocations. Additionally, because the pWave system will hand off to an existing LTE system, initial deployments can be small and grown incrementally.

Artemis is in talks with numerous carriers that are considering deployment. The pCell consumer launch is set for the fourth quarter of this year. The carrier partner has not been revealed. Full pCell deployment may begin in the first quarter of 2015.

“We have discussed this with major operators to see what it would take,” Perlman said. “We can certainly be in every major market by the end of the year.”

Perlman’s Track Record Rocks the Cutting Edge

Who is Steve Perlman? He is an entrepreneur and inventor in Internet, entertainment, multimedia, consumer electronics and communications technologies and services. He holds more than 135 U.S. patents in communications, video, graphics, facial capture, video gaming, software lens and wireless power technologies.

Perlman

Perlman’s 30 years of technology development experience includes the creation of QuickTime, Macintosh graphics and video, WebTV, the Moxi Media Center, MOVA Contour Facial Capture, and OnLive Cloud Gaming. But he has never seen the type response to a new product that he has had with the pWave technology.

“I have been doing start ups all my life,” he said. “I have never seen anything like this before. Since [our product] announcement, it is unbelievable the response that we have had worldwide. So many of the top carriers have reached out to us, I can’t keep track of them.”