Quotes of the Day

When Martin Cooper talks, tech people listen. After all, in 1973, Cooper invented the first cell phone small enough to use outside a car, forever changing the way the world lives and works. But today, some think this wry, lively elder statesman, now 75, is working to undermine the very mobile behemoths he helped create. That's because he's the founder and chairman of ArrayComm, a San Jose, California, company that has radically redesigned the antennae that send cellular signals to handsets — it may be a better product, but it's also a threat to some hundreds of billions of dollars invested by the mobile giants. He is overhauling the way wireless signals travel, ushering in what he calls the "revolutionary next stage in radio communications.''

Cooper is one of the World Economic Forum's 2005 Technology Pioneers who are helping the next generation of broadband and portable communications conquer the world. Along with other upstarts like Britain's Frontier Silicon, Israel's Wisair and Cornice from the U.S., ArrayComm is working to improve technologies already in use — like wi-fi and 3G — in order to give people wire-free access to e-mail and the Internet, and to provide them with cheap phone calls in the U.S., Europe, China and Korea, among other places. Between the four of them, they're pretty much covering the globe.

Wi-fi (wireless fidelity) is the cable-free technology that lets people surf websites and check e-mail while sitting in a Starbucks, an airport lounge, a hotel lobby, a city park or anywhere close to an antenna. The technology has grown dramatically in recent years: French research firm IDATE counts 130,000 hot spots in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and U.K. research group Analysys predicts that by 2009 there will be over 38 million wi-fi subscribers in the U.S. and Western Europe alone. Most observers believe that its next big step will be the introduction of WiMAX, a technology developed by Intel that, as soon as next year, should blanket not just coffee shops but entire cities.

But while the world waits for WiMAX, wireless operators in Sydney, Johannesburg, Paris and the Bay Area are already deploying ArrayComm's new antenna design, to the dismay of mobile carriers. Conventional mobile antennae, Cooper says, "are really just a bunch of sticks — we make them smart.'' Where conventional masts send out signals in circular arcs — a process that wastes transmission power because only the signals that hit a phone are used — an ArrayComm antenna transmits signals in a straight line, targeting a particular phone that it recognizes using specialized software. Cooper says ArrayComm's software, which resides in computers at transmitting base stations, can reach 40 times more people than conventional antennae, and cost six times less to deploy. For now, ArrayComm seems to be leaping ahead of WiMAX. So are mobile-phone operators rushing to embrace ArrayComm's technology? Not exactly. Many Western mobile operators, such as Vodafone and T-Mobile, have invested billions of dollars and euros — over $100 billion alone just to buy government licenses — in 3G phone systems that use conventional arc designs. As operators struggle to make those four-year-old investments pay off, they're not about to switch to ArrayComm. Although ArrayComm was able to license its technology to Chinese and Japanese operators that deploy a more compatible mobile-phone system, Western operators have declined. So ArrayComm is selling to wireless Internet providers like Sydney's Personal Broadband Australia (in which ArrayComm is a partial owner) that are in various stages of covering cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Frontier Silicon, based in Watford, England, is also trying to expand what phones can do. Frontier is building a chip that allows a cell phone to double as a TV, so that a user could watch, say, sports highlights while waiting for a train. The chip, called Chorus, receives broadcast signals from television operators, digitally encoded so they can't be intercepted. That system is a threat to mobile operators, because broadcast signals bypass cellular networks. A phone owner could receive video programming without having to buy it from a mobile network provider.

Frontier is providing the chip to Samsung, which is building it into a mobile device for the Korean market. Beginning in the first quarter of next year, several broadcasters, including the Korean Broadcasting System, will start airing programs tailored to it. "Within the next five years, the major new killer application on mobile phones will be the reception of digital TV and radio,'' says Frontier founder and chief executive Anthony Sethill. And there's more in store. Frontier is adding digital recording to a chip it makes for televisions, so that it acts like a personal video recorder (PVR); a version should be available for many British customers starting in April.

Of course, even the most committed promoters of mobile video know that today's electronic devices often aren't worth watching. One challenge is storage capacity; video files take up vast tracts of memory space, so traditional storage methods like memory sticks and standard hard drives are too costly, fragile or clumsy. And workable future alternatives based on nanotechnology and holograms have so far failed to materialize. So Cornice Inc. of Colorado is trying to perfect a technology based on the standard hard drive, which has been around the computer business for nearly a half-century. Cornice has shrunk the drive, normally about 10.2 cm by 14.6 cm by 2.5 cm in a standard computer, to a cell phone?friendly 3.6 cm by 4.3 cm by 0.5cm. It removed a lot of the supporting electronic chips, transferring tasks like disc-speed control and memory buffering to other chips on the cell phone. Co-founder Curt Bruner says this helps make his device less fragile than 2.5-cm drives on the market.

Bruner calls it a "storage element" rather than a drive; it holds about 2 GB of information, enough for 600 songs or 1,200 at sub-CD quality, on a disc that is a quarter of the size of an iPod's. Samsung started deploying it in a phone in Korea in Septem-ber. That's why Bruner insists that the days of the iPod, and any other music-only device, are numbered. "I believe strongly that Apple's market will fade away over-night when you see the first cost-effective music-playing phone,'' says Bruner. "In 2006, you'll see the demise of the stand-alone music player.'' Another wireless challenge is in the home. Although households, especially in the U.S. and Asia, are increasingly popular places for wireless networks, wi-fi has difficulty handling large video files. That's because its speed is not always fast enough to transport movies without glitches; you may have noticed the problem when trying to beam Bridget Jones's Diary from the computer in your living room to your TV in the corner. Several companies are working to develop another wireless technology called UWB (ultra wide band) that provides 10 times the bandwidth of wi-fi. Although UWB signals don't travel as far as wi-fi, they travel far enough to beam Bridget. One of the leaders in this potentially lucrative field is Tel Aviv-based Wisair. The company's founder and chief executive David Yaish touts a variety of applications for his chips; a phone outfitted with UWB could download songs and videos from the same living-room server. Digital and video cameras outfitted with UWB could transfer their contents to home PCs, sans wire. Not only does UWB handle larger files faster than wi-fi, but it consumes much less power, says Yaish. Result: longer battery life on a UWB device than on a wi-fi gadget.

Like many consumer technologies, UWB started out as military technology, used for communications that avoided eavesdroppers by spreading over a very wide range of frequencies. Yaish, 39, became familiar with it when he served in the Israeli army in the early '90s as a wireless specialist. Today, he and other UWB proponents are honing a standard they hope will assure that all UWB devices communicate in the same way. Wisair is part of a large contingent backing one proposed standard, while Freescale, the chip company carved out of Motorola, backs another. The existence of competing standards means that market forecasts vary. Gartner analyst Stan Bruederle says the UWB market will hit a modest $400 million in 2008; San Diego research firm ON World predicts a $1 billion market by then. Yaish subscribes to the more bullish estimate. "UWB technology signals a new era for communication between electronic devices,'' he says. "Millions of people will enjoy the freedom of anytime, anywhere fast wireless connectivity between all consumer electronic devices in their homes and offices. This is the new reality." Of course, the biggest test for all the Pioneers is: Will people actually use their technology? There are, for instance, at least half a dozen technologies vying to become the next-gen wi-fi, and only one will win. Take it from Cooper, the grand old man of ArrayComm, who says, "everything takes longer than you think, because people take time to change.'' But then, he notes, people balked at the PC and the cell phone, too.

• Mark Halper
• TV on your mobile, smart antennae and wireless cities — thank the Pioneers