After three enterprising decades at Motorola Inc.-during which he pioneered high-capacity paging and the first radiotelephone-succeeded by several telecom start-up firms, Martin Cooper was ready to hang up his spurs.
That was four years ago. Today Cooper, along with the esteemed scientist and engineer who rescued him from retirement, Dr. Richard Roy, and the others at San Jose, Calif.-based ArrayComm Inc., is launching IntelliCell, a digital signal processing platform based on intelligent antenna technology invented by Roy, chief technical officer, and his colleagues at Stanford University.
In the 1980s Roy and his colleagues introduced space division multiple access, a technology that could have “potentially revolutionized the personal communications wireless industry,” said Cooper. But SDMA was before its time. “Computers weren’t powerful enough to operate it,” he added.
The evolution of that technology is perfected in IntelliCell. “The principle is elementary,” said Cooper, ArrayComm chairman and chief executive officer. “Today we spray energy in all directions. Why not aim it directly?”
The IntelliCell combined hardware and software platform is installed in a base station. Using spatial and temporal parameters, the technology deciphers antenna signals, selecting only those which are desirable and refusing those undesirable. The result is “two times the range and four times the coverage all the while rejecting interference,” Cooper explained. Intellicell aims energy directly toward the desired handsets, which reduces radio frequency interference in the surrounding network.
Cooper outlined three imperatives that drive today’s emerging wireless technologies and to which IntelliCell responds. First, deploying cellular and derivative technologies is costly. Second, the quality of wireless communicating must be comparable or better than that of wireline in order to compete with wireline, said Cooper. And as spectrum is finite, technology must work toward greater efficiency.
IntelliCell requires fewer base stations, which cuts costs. The technology also is adaptive, which simplifies network design and reduces site acquisition and installation costs.
While RF interference limits capacity and degrades voice quality, IntelliCell’s real-time interference rejection and directive transmission improves capacity and quality, said the company. IntelliCell transmits on spatial channels “which will allow*…*multiple users to communicate on the same conventional voice channel in the same cell at the same time,” said ArrayComm.
The company will concentrate business in low-mobility personal communications services and wireless local loop applications, said Cooper. “The base station wireless local loop market will be a rapidly growing market for the next 20 to 30 years,” particularly where landline service is poor or nonexistent, stated Cooper. WLL networks cost less to deploy than landline networks, he added. IntelliCell can be integrated with any analog or digital transmission method, said the company.
Kyocera of Japan, the equipment maker for DDI Pocket Phone’s personal handyphone system, plans to install a variation of IntelliCell by year-end. Capacity and interference are key obstacles of Japan’s PHS. DDI claims half the 1.5 million plus PHS subscribers, said Cooper, adding that PHS’ growth rate over the last nine months is the fastest growth of any consumer product ever.
ArrayComm has a Global System for Mobile communications alliance with Alcatel Telecom of France, and Sweden-based Allgon will build IntelliCell components.
ArrayComm’s president and chief operating officer, Karl Martersteck, has a 36-year history with AT&T Bell Laboratories that includes design of AT&T’s flagship 5ESS digital switch. Most recently he was vice president of, AT&T Architecture, a unit that identifies new technologies for AT&T products and services. Arnaud Saffari, ArrayComm’s co-founder and executive vice president, spent the 20 years prior to ArrayComm as a marketing and technical consultant in defense electronics and telecommunications. Craig Barratt joined the company as vice president of engineering.
