Wireless operators to become less, er, wireless Everyone is making small base stations this year, some will even drop into the palm of a hand, but that's good as operators are desperate to get their wireless services safely ensconced in copper as quickly as possible. Radio is very expensive, both in terms of power consumption and the cost of spectrum, so the less radio an …
Funny how a decades after the Majors here in the US squashed the Ricochet wireless system for consumers they are now copying them. I got in an argument with a friend that did an internship working on cell phone silicon. She swore it was impossible to get a 128k link on mobile wireless at the time. I tried to explain the differences between relaying signal to a big cell tower way over there and lots of cheap shoeboxes that are much closer. She didn't get it. Neither did her employers. Or maybe they were just waiting for someones patents to expire
There was probably more to it than that. A lot of the work seems to be working around the problem of crosstalk. Having a lot of small cells is only good if the small cells don't cross signals with each other. Your idea at the time was probably ahead of its time because the logic needed wasn't robust enough. Thanks in part to Moore's Law, we seem to have crossed the threshold of practicality.
This Small Cell idea sounds interesting, especially once you think INSIDE the boxes, as in big boxes where traditional cell signals have trouble. A Small Cell inside a big box store would probably relieve a few headaches. Barring the presence of a hotspot, I've historically had problems using cell phones within these types of stores. I can picture Walmart (who runs an MVNO off T-Mobile) perhaps trying something like that.
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