Last week Artemis Networks unveiled a technology that company founder Steve Perlman said would revolutionize the wireless industry. So far the world has seen a brief demonstration of the technology, called pCell, which promises to overcome the dropped calls, congestion and slow data rates of traditional wireless networks. It creates a “personal cell” around the antenna of mobile devices that support LTE and delivers the full spectrum concurrently to each device.
pCell’s promise that thousands of people in a stadium could be watching HD video simultaneously on their mobile devices without any degradation sounds too good to be true. Carriers, Internet Service Providers or platform providers have not yet publicly signaled their interest, but the technology must be alluring to them.
Artemis took a step toward making its pCell technology more real today, signing a deal with with PureWave Networks to supply its pWave radio base stations, which will be deployed in trials this year and with companies who might adopt the technology.
Artemis is first targeting metropolitan areas, such as San Francisco, Chicago and Dallas, that suffer from wireless congestion. The company is planning a trial deployment of pWave radios on 350 rooftops in San Francisco and expects its first commercial deployment by the end of 2014 with a carrier or a platform company, such as Google, which had already deployed its own fiber network to nearly 40 cities across the U.S.