BANDWIDTH BREAKTHROUGH
These days cell phones are getting dirt cheap, and everyone is going mobile. But each new phone needs its own piece of the radio spectrum pie, and right now there are only so many slices.
The trick, says Bell Labs scientist Reinaldo Valenzuela, is for many callers to share a single frequency. To make that possible, Valenzuela's team developed BLAST (Bell Labs Layered Space-Time).
Traditionally, sending many signals over the same frequency produces radio cacophony. But instead of transmitting from one antenna to another, BLAST beams multiple messages from multiple antennas to several receivers. The signals each take a different path, bouncing off objects, and in the process brand themselves with a unique footprint. At the receiving end, digital signal processors puzzle out the radio babble by isolating the strongest signal and extracting it, then the next strongest, and so on.
BLAST will let companies with a fixed allotment of bandwidth multiply the number of customers they serve (or offer customers a higher bit rate). At first, BLAST products will end up in fixed-wireless LANs. But Valenzuela's team is attempting to shrink the antenna array to fit in mobile handsets. Then he expects BLAST to be snapped up by cellcos like Sprint and AT&T, since it could increase their bandwidth capacity tenfold overnight.
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