Significant Development For 4G In The Classroom

Many students bring their own devices to school but they usually have to get on the school’s wifi network in order to do anything intensive such as watch a video. This can be problematic when a class of 30 students does this at once much less a lecture hall of 200+. It turns out there might be a solution in a form I didn’t expect. (H/T Kurzweilai.com)

Entrepreneur Steve Perlman has demonstrated a new wireless technology called pcell that he says will facilitate ubiquitous broadband mobile connections, enabling an unlimited number of devices to share the same spectrum simultaneously, Venturebeat reports.

He founded a company called Artemis to commercialize this research into how to get cell phones to make full use of the 4G wireless spectrum. In the video below, skip forward to 26 minutes to see the demo.

I’m a bit hazy on what they are doing but it appears that they are defining a custom waveform for each phone. It’s basically the “language” of the signal. This then allows the phone to talk to the base station without interfering with each other. If this can be deployed cheaply it will mean existing 4G networks will work much more efficiently in crowded situation, such as in cities (and in classrooms).

Could this mean that it will be more practical for students to just stay on 4G and bypass the school’s wifi network? Maybe so. Where this will be really useful is when we embed connectivity into every day objects. This will drastically cut down on the Internet traffic jams that this would create.

We will see how this pans out. I have seen too many tech demos like this that fizzle for some reason.