At CTIA Wireless this week, Ericsson Networked Society Evangelist Mats Guldbrand gave me a demo of the technology at the equipment maker’s booth. Basically, a small antenna element is embedded into a pane of shielded glass. That antenna can pick up Wi-Fi or cellular signals from nearby phones, tablets and laptops and then aggregate those connections, sending them as a combined transmission to the nearest LTE cell tower.

Guldbrand gave an example of a bus containing 50 people all surfing the internet on their smartphones. Each device is trying to connect separately to the same tower, and you wind up with a big mess. Not only are all of those signals interfering with one another, the network is trying to manage 50 simultaneous hand-overs between cell towers. The network might be able to pull it off, but everyone’s experience suffers, Guldbrand said.

If those 50 devices, however, were all connecting to localized antennas embedded in the vehicle’s windows, the bus could then link to the cellular network through a single transmitter mounted on the roof. It’s much easier for the cellular base station to handle a single high-capacity connection than a bunch of smaller connections. Everyone in the bus experiences greater speeds and more resilient links, and since each device isn’t reaching out to a distant tower, their device battery life is spared.

This might sound a bit like the repeater or range-booster kits you can buy to enhance your cellphone’s signal at home, but this technology is designed to integrate closely with the network. Normally a repeater would create all kinds of interference in a crowded network, but by using shielded glass Ericsson can limit the number of competing transmissions bouncing around the cell. The treated windows (and the steel frame) block signals trying to escape the bus, turning it into a kind of Faraday Cage on wheels.

Forthcoming LTE-Advanced technologies will introduce network relay points mounted on bus rooftops and utility poles, which would route signals within the cell. The principle is simple: if you can narrow the distance between network hops you get more resilient and higher-capacity connections.

Ericsson has other plans for connected glass. Guldbrand said that as long as the windows are networked, you could embed all kinds of technology into their surfaces. As part of the demo, Guldbrand showed me a pane of plain glass with an infrared field on its surface. When you interrupted the field with your hand at specific points, you triggered actions like turning on and off the lights or skipping between songs on the stereo. So not only the windows in your future home access the internet, they could replace your light switches and remote controls.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user irabel8

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Kymeta is the second startup to be spun out of Intellectual Ventures’ vast intellectual property portfolio, having launched its first, nuclear power startup TerraPower, in 2008. But as my colleague Jeff Roberts points out, IV’s primary business is that of a patent troll, vigorously pursuing legal action against companies that don’t agree to license its vast trove of intellectual property. IV, however, has been trying to clean up its image, insisting it will use its intellectual property for both public good and technological innovation. According to its website, Kymeta is the first commercial offspring from a decade of work in the field of metamaterials:

Kymeta is the result of our patience and persistence. Based on IV’s metamaterials satellite antenna technology (MSA-T), Kymeta’s mTenna products will simplify the satellite connections needed for broadband Internet on the go, anywhere in the world.

Why not just develop this product ourselves? IV creates new companies like Kymeta (or previously TerraPower) to focus on bringing particularly promising new inventions to market so that our inventors can continue doing what they do best – dreaming up the next big idea.

Kymeta will part from IV with a fistful of cash, $12 million, supplied by some impressive backers: Bill Gates, Liberty Global and Lux Capital. It plans to put those funds to use building briefcase-sized satellite antennas that can be mounted on planes, trains, boats and ships and just about any highway vehicle.

Satellite may not seem like the most cost-effective or efficient way of providing broadband to a train or bus full of laptop-wielding passengers, but the technology has come a long way in recent years. Last year, ViaSat put a satellite into orbit that can support up to 140 Gbps of capacity throughout its North American footprint. Those impressive delivery capabilities mean ViaSat and its partner Dish Network can offer 12 Mbps downlink and 3 Mbps uplink speeds for little more than the cost of a cable or DSL connection.

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Theoretical speeds are just that, theoretical. Just as T-Mobile’s 21 Mbps and 42 Mbps HSPA+ systems could never actually deliver those peak speeds in real world environments, eAccess customers won’t be downloading the human genome onto their smartphones. TeleGeography reported that subscribers to the carrier’s eMobile service can expect more realistic speeds of 75 Mbps with a 25 Mbps uplink tossed in for good measure. Considering that’s faster than most residential broadband connections, I doubt customers will complain.

In order to achieve that performance, eAccess had to max out the technical capabilities of today’s LTE standard (for the less acronym averse, that’s 3GPP Release 8), a luxury that many global operators don’t share. eAccess is building its network over 40 MHz of spectrum, while Verizon’s and AT&T’s rollouts use 20 MHz or less.

EAccess also has to cram four LTE antennas into its devices, while we only use two antennas stateside. It’s highly unlikely eAccess will be able to incorporate this technology into smartphones. Double antennas mean double the power consumption, but they also create a problem for spatial design. Those antennas will need room to stretch, otherwise the network won’t find them. That probably means the full capabilities of the network will only be available to larger devices such as laptops or tablets. Or if eAccess sticks to its wireline roots, it may use it as residential broadband service. A smartphone with a 75 Mbps connections is overkill anyway.

When can we expect networks like this in the U.S.? Well, the operators are working on incorporating technologies from the next wireless standard, LTE-Advanced, into their current networks. LTE-Advanced promises speeds as high as 1 Gbps for stationary devices, but operators don’t have the spectrum to implement the full capabilities of the standard at once. We’ll likely see more conservative LTE-Advanced deployments that may well give eAccess’ super-LTE network a challenge in a dead heat.

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