NEW YORK — As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers — those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade.
Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without man
y more of them. Instead, it’s looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings — virtually anywhere with electrical and network connections.
If the technology overcomes some hurdles, it could upend the wireless industry and offer seamless service, with fewer dead spots and faster data speeds.
Some big names in the wireless world will demonstrate “small cell” technologies at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest cell phone trade show, which started Monday in Barcelona, Spain.
“We see more and more towers that become bigger and bigger, with more and bigger antennas that come to obstruct our view and clutter our landscape and are simply ugly,” said Wim Sweldens, president of the wireless division of Alcatel-Lucent, the French-U.S. maker of telecommunications equipment.
“What we have realized is that we, as one of the major mobile equipment vendors, are partially if not mostly to blame for this.”
Alcatel-Lucent is at the show to demonstrate its “lightRadio cube,” a cellular antenna about the size and shape of a Rubik’s cube, vastly smaller than the ironing-board-sized antennas that now decorate cell towers. The cube was developed at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey, birthplace of many other inventions when it was AT&T’s research center.
In Alcatel-Lucent’s vision, these little cubes could soon begin replacing conventional cell towers. Single cubes or clusters of them could be placed indoors or out and be easily hidden from view. All they need is electrical power and an optical fiber connecting them to the phone company’s network.
The cube, Sweldens said, can make the notion of a conventional cell tower “go away.” Alcatel-Lucent will start trials of the cube with carriers in September. The company hopes to make it commercially available next year.
Rasmus Hellberg, director of technical marketing at wireless technology developer Qualcomm Inc., said smaller cells can boost a network’s capacity tenfold, far more than can be achieved by other upgrades to wireless technology that are also in the works.
That’s sure to draw the interest of phone companies. They’ve already been deploying older generations of small-cell technology in areas where a lot of people gather, like airports, train stations and sports stadiums, but these are expensive and complicated to install.
British femtocell maker Ubiquisys Ltd. is in Barcelona to demonstrate the smallest cell yet. It’s the size of a thumb and plugs into a computer’s USB drive. According to Ubiquisys, the idea is that overseas travellers will plug it into their Internet-connected laptops to make calls as if they were on their home network, but there are potential problems with interference if used that way.
Picochip, a British company that’s the dominant maker of chips for femtocells, will be in Barcelona to talk about its chips for “public-access” femtocells, designed to serve up to 64 phone calls at a time, with a range of more than a mile. They could be used not just to ease wireless congestion in urban areas, but to fill in dead spots on the map, Baines said. For instance, a single femtocell could provide wireless service to a remote village, as long as there’s some way to connect it to the wider network, perhaps via satellite.
Analyst Francis Sideco of research firm iSuppli pointed out a surprising consumer benefit of smaller cells: better battery life in phones.
When a lot of phones talk to the same tower, they all have to “shout” to make themselves heard, using more energy. With a smaller cell, phones can lower their “voices,” much like group of people moving from a noisy ballroom to a smaller, quieter room.
“Ultimately, what you end up with is a cleaner signal, with less power,” Sideco said.
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