After three years of waiting, Steve Perlman has unveiled his prototype called DIDO, a technology that could do away with wireless network congestion, according to Bloomberg. This technology would give each smart phone and tablet its own super-fast connection rather than asking these devices to share bandwidth with a cell tower. Bloomberg reported that, “Perlman bills the wireless system as basically the successor to LTE, the current high-speed wireless technology. In demonstrations at his laboratory, Perlman showed off iPhones, Surface tablets, and TVs streaming massive files—the 4K UltraHD version of House of Cards from Netflix, for example—via his own wireless networking equipment. The demonstration proved not only that the high-speed wireless technology worked but also that it would work with existing devices that support LTE.” There is, however, a problem that Perlman is trying to solve and it deals with current wireless networks.
“Companies like AT&T and Verizon will put up a cell tower that sends out a signal, which must then be shared by any people in range. The idea is to have the signals overlap at the edges of their range like a series of circles nudging up against each other. The arrangement must be done very artfully because the circles cause interference if they’re too close. As a result, there are spots in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco where you often have tons of people in the same cell all placing calls and pulling down data to their devices at the same time, and their connections slow because they’re all sharing the bandwidth in that given area. The congestion issue is expected to get worse and worse as people keeping adding wireless devices and downloading larger and larger media files,” Bloomberg reported.
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