Steve Perlman wants to turn your apartment into an antenna for his new cellular phone network.
Perlman is a serial Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur best known for selling his web TV company to Microsoft for half a billion dollars, and over the last few years, he and his team of engineers have built a contraption that aims to significantly boost the speed of our cellular services. He could license this technology to the big-name wireless carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon, as a way of improving their networks. But that's not the only option. He can ask you to set it up.
If you install this tiny antenna on your roof, Perlman says, it can receive wireless calls and data not just from your own mobile phone but from mobile phones across the neighborhood. Then it can route these calls and data across your home internet connection towards their ultimate destination. And when it does, he’ll give you a cut of the revenue from this crowdsourced phone network---a network that, thanks to the antenna's unusual design, could increase wireless speeds several times over.
He calls it the “Uberization” of mobile phone networks, a nod to the controversial startup that can turned anyone into a taxi driver. But it also echoes similar efforts to bootstrap massive WiFi networks via the citizens of the world. As markets for so many things are (slowly) moving towards a kind of “sharing economy,” Perlman believes that working together---combined with his company’s unusual one-to-one technology for cell connections---could make wireless better.
The scheme is a long way from fruition---a very long way---but Perlman is pushing things forward. In February, his company, Artemis, announced that it will soon push its tiny high-speed cellular antennas across about 600 rooftops in San Francisco. It’ll do so through a company called Webpass, which already provides internet service inside many apartment buildings and offices across the city. Basically, once the regulatory issues are ironed out, Webpass will install the antennas, route calls and data over its existing internet connections, and share in the revenue---much as Perlman hopes individuals will do at their own homes.
Perlman will begin pitching homeowners in places like Kansas City, where Google is offering super-fast (and super-reliable) home internet connections through a service called Google Fiber. These connections offer the stability Artemis needs to route calls and data from its tiny antennas.
“We can have citizen installers,” says Perlman, who also helped develop Quicktime, the video software for the Apple Macintosh. “You put these little things on a rooftop. You slap it onto Google Fiber. And we can light up a place like Kansas City in no time at all.”
It’s an audacious undertaking---maybe even quixotic. Given the power of the country’s wireless carriers, the regulatory hurdles, and possible contractual limitations in landline internet services like Google Fiber, it may never work. But Perlman is at least trying to shove cellular networks in a new direction---something they certainly need. And, it so happens, Google is working to push things forward too. If Perlman needs a partner, this is the obvious choice.
What makes his plan possible, Perlman says, are the rather unusual antennas he and his company have built. He calls the technology pCell---short for “personal cell.”
These aren’t like traditional cellular antennas. They don’t just blanket an area with a single signal, or cell, that all phones share. Instead, multiple antennas transmit signals that combine to create a "personal cell" that follows you and your phone from place to place. Since you don't share this signal with anyone else, you have access to much more bandwidth than you typically would on an ordinary cell network. And with enough antennas, you’re less likely to lose a strong signal.
It’s unclear just how well the tech will work in the real world. “There are still questions about its effectiveness---especially when used with other wireless technologies,” says Jim McGregor, who closely follows the cellular market as the founder and principal analyst of a research firm called Tirias. But Perlman says these antennas are also built in a way that lets him readily erect a test network---or even complete network---without help from the AT&Ts and Verizons.
The added trick is that these antennas are relatively small and simple (similar to devices consumer can install in their homes simply to boost their own cell service). That means individuals can easily install them on their own. “You don’t need to have any more skill than you would need to install a satellite dish,” Perlman says. And if you have a reliable fiber internet connection---such as Google Fiber---you can help Perlman bootstrap his network.
Rob Gatehouse, the vice president of product management at a wireless antenna maker called Airvana, says his company has explored a similar setup with a “tier one” wireless carrier, and he warns that Perlman may need approval from the internet services that his antennas plug in to (e.g. Google Fiber).
But the government’s new net neutrality rules, unloaded last month, may prevent internet providers from barring such a setup. “Does Google really have to bless what you do with your home internet connection?” says Charles Barr, the CEO of Webpass, the internet provider that’s installing Perlman’s antennas in San Francisco. “If the network is neutral, they shouldn’t be involved.”
Google did not immediately respond to request for comment on whether its terms of service would allow for this sort of arrangement. But it appears that they do not. And Perlman acknowledges he will have to navigate the terms of service for the home and business internet connections his antennas tap into. But as he points out, Google is typically on the side of net neutrality---and like Perlman, it's interested in improving our wireless networks.
Regardless, Perlman must also ensure that phones can use his antennas. At the moment, phones can’t use his pCells without a new SIM card, the tiny network cards that slip into the back of each device.
In his favor, brand new FCC rules say that if you own a phone outright, you must be allowed to change the SIM. In an apparent effort to comply with this, Apple is now offering a “virtual SIM” on the iPad, the kind of thing that may let you reconfigure your phone for pCell without installing new hardware. In short, much needs to change for Perlman’s plan to work.
But change is already underway. Big wireless carriers, the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world, are losing their market power, and users are gaining. On one end, Apple is giving you a way of seamlessly moving between carriers. And on the other, Perlman is trying to make big, ugly, expensive cell towers obsolete. All he needs is you.
