Soon cell towers will start following you | Hacker News Reader

Soon cell towers will start following you

gigaom.com

52 pointsmichaporat30 comments

This has the advantage that it is quite easy to implement for present networks.

Personally, I'd still save the title "THE most revolutionary networking technology I've seen in a long time" for the next-gen phased array smart antennas and MU-MIMO techniques.

Indeed. I believe you are referring to this: http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/28/steve-perlman-unveils-dido...

Sounds like they're just adjusting some existing parameter in realtime which has previously been adjusted manually. This is not revolutionary, just a small optimization.

If you have (too much) time, there's a video explaining some of the cognitive radio technologies researched by Nokia Research Center http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3W43pyEgSk

Correct - turns out that the OP is a principal at Genesis Partners, who funded the startup behind this technology:

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=michaporat

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/intucell

May still be valuable tech, but the title seems a bit disingenuous without the poster's disclosure.

They are actually funded by Bessemer. Crunchbase is wrong.

"Intucell estimates these techniques can [...] boost overall data capacity throughout the network anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent."

That's the equivalent of a few months normal growth in mobile data demand...

Ha! Maybe an exaggeration, but not much of one. Then again there's the problem of whenever operators create new capacity their customers just fill it.

A quick google for "compound annual growth rate mobile data" turns up numbers around 100%, so 30% would take 4 or 5 months and 50% might be 7 or so. You're right, an exaggeration to call 4-7 "a few", but certainly not much of one.

I have always wondered why cell carriers/manufacturers have not moved to a phased array type system yet. It has been available for WiFi deployments for quite some time. This seems like a step in the right direction.

I have apparently not gained enough esteem in this community to have a down arrow, but that title is really bad. It's sensationalist and not descriptive enough to be useful.

No one can downvote stories. You can flag it, but I'm not sure if that's the correct procedure for a bad title. I think the OP can change the title, maybe.

Of course, once this exists, they can start selling QoS levels. Then the towers will only aggressively adjust for those people who are paying for the privilege.

I cannot understand what this technology is supposed to do. What does it mean for a cell to expand or shrink? Or follow a customer? Why not just have all cells "expand" to maximum at all times? Power-savings? Interference?

Also, as jka points out,

> the OP is a principal at Genesis Partners, who funded the startup behind this technology...May still be valuable tech, but the title seems a bit disingenuous without the poster's disclosure.

Read the article, it explains the concept fairly well.

This is also pretty bad ass:

http://gigaom.com/broadband/wi-fi-its-the-other-cell-network...

Many wi-fi nodes (via Ruckus Wireless) backhauling over wimax.

I work at a direct competitor to that, and lets just say that I'm less than impressed by their so called seamless sign on.

It requires the user to download a special client - that is a big big threshold for the average user. Let me contrast this by having the phone automatically get the information needed as operator settings from the app-store and then automatically start to offload without bothering the user further.

Also, why use wimax? It is a tech that is slowly dying (despite the fact that it gains users - it is expected to peak userwise in a year or two).

Thanks for the info. My focus has been in a different area for the last few years (hospitals) so I was not aware wimax was dying.

I did see the part about the special client, but having not gone through the process - I am unaware how cumbersome this is, aside from obviously being more cumbersome than having to do nothing.

What is replacing it. Or, rather, what do you think is interesting and promising in mobile data?

It is cumbersome enough that many end users won't use it.

Wimax is not part of 4G/LTE, so naturally that is what will replace it.

I had an idea, about 90% of the time I need internet on my smartphone, my car is between me and the cell tower, or if not it is within half a mile of me.

Cell phone companies could put "always on" cell phone repeater in my car, drinking from a large li-ion battery that is charged by the engine, so when my smartphone doesn't have enough punch to reach the cell tower, it has enough power to reach my car's repeater, which has enough power to reach the cell tower. If I could charge the company 0.001 cents every time someone else's phone routes through my repeater, the company could save billions on cell towers. Use the nation's cars as a mobile cell phone network. A Billion dollar idea right there.

While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it won't work.

Pretty much all cellular communications nowadays uses CDMA of one flavor or another. An important property of CDMA is that any signal that I send to the tower actually causes more noise for the other users in the network. This id called being interference limited. For this reason, there is a ton of effort going into power control, so that reach user sends just enough power to reach the tower but not more. Your cell phone COULD boost it's transmit power to reach the tower, but it would ruin everyone else's connection.

So what's to stop people from hacking their cell phones to break things for everyone else?

Cell towers can detect the receive power of any given cell phone on their network. If you just hacked your cell phone to use high transmit strength, they would know and could kick you off their network.

I can imagine that you could rig your cell phone (or another device) to transmit at high power to jam the connection, but the FCC would have something to say about it. If you're caught, I'd expect civil and criminal reprisals...

Stiff fines. If suddenly the only signal the tower's picking up is yours, it doesn't take too long to figure out who is responsible.

Prepaid phone, bought with cash, and left in a public place?

If you keep it up it can be triangulated, I suppose. Other than that, the tower would have to shift everyone to a different frequency.

look up pico-cells.

Not sure you would want that. An always-on repeater in your car means every time you are moving away from a base station, the repeater would have to power up in order to continue the reception, even if you are not using your smartphone. This is a recipe for a generation infested with radiation-effected diseases...

Do you have particular insight into disease caused by non-ionizing radiation that the rest of the world is missing? I've seen no study that has been able to conclusively link non-ionizing radiation to human health problems, or really any other effect beyond a slight warming of tissue.

Without hard proof of such an effect from radio transmissions, your post falls into the bucket of baseless scaremongering. Behavior like this only results in impeding technological progress.

The effect of non-ionizing radiation is well know here is one for example... quoting "At present, the fact that NIR exerts both stimulatory and inhibitory effects on different physiological cellular parameters is rather unquestionable." Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9587915

The impact on specific diseases is still in its infancy, and thus shows little results. I doubt any oncologist would have install your proposed solution...

I'm going to need a whole lot more than one random study from 1998 to believe that. The whole idea seems very cooky and alarmist.

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