NEW YORK-Some 27 years after he placed the first “public portable cellular call,” from Midtown Manhattan to Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Martin Cooper said he is unsure “if we, as an industry, have grown up yet.”
Introduced at “Wireless World 2000” as the inventor of the cell phone, the chief executive officer of ArrayComm said he finds it instructive that only 15 percent of the U.S. population use wireless phones today. Just 3 percent to 4 percent of talk time in this country goes over cellular and personal communications services networks.
“Given a choice, if wireless were as reliable and cost the same as wireline, why would you use wireline? You might think Europe is better, but I was in Britain two weeks ago giving this same talk. The only difference is you pay more in Europe for the privilege of having calls dropped,” he said in his keynote address.
Even third-generation wireless appears unlikely to offer substantial improvements in network capacity, and this dilemma remains a persistent and intractable problem.
“After the initial (commercial) systems were established in 1983, the next generation was supposed to solve the capacity problem. The industry took its eye off the ball and spent billions of dollars on digital,” Cooper said. “It was a war fought with hyperbole. TDMA and CDMA were supposed to be 10 times to 40 times better. The result? A 2.6 times improvement in capacity. This is not to suggest we should not have moved to digital because it offers better battery life and security, but that is not a lot of bang for a lot of bucks.”
While third-generation cellular “will provide a step forward in voice, it does not offer much for data,” Cooper said. The 2 Megabits per second in maximum raw data rates translates into 1.1 Megabits per second in actual maximum data rates. For each channel on each cell, this must be divided among all the users on that channel. Even NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service offers users just 64 kilobits per second, speeds just a bit faster than dial-up modems, he added.
To a conference geared to wireless applications developers, Cooper offered several of his favorite possibilities. These are ready to go but held back at the starting gate due to the limitations of today’s wireless networks and the business models of companies running them, he said.
The first is a shirt that measures 39 vital bodily functions and can transmit those readings to a doctor. This one item has a U.S. market potential of $100 billion, he said.
Closer to the heart of this avid California beach jogger is an instant wireless download of music into his Sony player so that he doesn’t need to record from a compact disk or download from the Internet and then undertake conversion to a more suitable format.
Wirelessly transmitted interactive games, played among people in many countries, will provide a value-added service not just to carriers but also to international relations, Cooper said.
“Now the focus is on wireless Internet access through a small handset and a network designed for voice. … We will need a system specifically designed for the Internet, which is intentionally an open system. The structure of today’s telecom industry is a closed platform. Legacy carriers own the pipes and insist they will own the customers,” Cooper said.
“(The network) must always be on, packet switched to avoid dial-up connections, offering 1 Megabit per second speeds so you can deliver music and video in 10-15 seconds. There are a bunch of people working on this issue, my company among them.”
Cooper said the wireless industry would be better off today had it “spent some small fraction of early capital expenditures early on” to use smart antenna technology for network quality improvements. He called this a “self-serving comment” because a key component of ArrayComm’s business involves smart antenna development.
Even without widespread smart antenna deployment, Cooper said the ability to use spectrum has doubled every two-and-a-half years for the past century, according to a law named after him. He believes smart antenna technology will continue that trajectory for at least 60 more years.
“Smart antenna technology is extraordinarily efficient. You only need 5 (MHz) to 10 MHz of spectrum to provide service to many millions of subscribers. That’s a sliver compared to 3G.”
In Italy and other European countries, ArrayComm is in negotiations with carriers that won 5 MHz-10 MHz of unpaired spectrum in the third-generation wireless auctions “to save some of that unpaired spectrum for us,” Cooper said.
In the United States, ArrayComm plans to bid in upcoming Federal Communications Commission auctions for these “orphaned” pieces of spectrum, he said. Because they are not paired, they cannot be used for traditional cellular communications.
ArrayComm is on schedule to begin next year in San Diego its FCC-sanctioned trial of its iBurst network involving up to 3,000 customers. The purpose is to demonstrate an open platform with multiple applications on the same network.
“We’re aimed at road warriors and consumers, optimizing our system for people in fixed locations and those moving slowly, delivering Internet access wirelessly, simply and at low cost.”
“We are engaged in discussions with new kinds of carriers, like Level 3, Qwest, Cable & Wireless … wholesalers that don’t want to own the customer. We also will use them for IP (Internet Protocol) backhaul.”
ArrayComm sees possible alliances with a variety of different players, including tower companies seeking to expand into applications delivery, systems integrators and Internet portals like America Online Inc.
“The big carriers want one universal system, but the concept of a universal system is insane in the telecommunications world of the future,” Cooper said.
“The total market is so huge that each time a competitive influence finds a way to differentiate itself, it becomes a market.”
