WNA

Steve Perlman, the guy behind WebTV and OnLive, says his innovative pCell wireless technology, will be tested by Dish Networks this summer.

Artemis is working with small cell vendor PureWave Networks to design and develop pCell base stations, called pWaves, for trial deployments, reports FierceWireless.

According to Artemis’ recent filing with the FCC, it plans on deploying routers that will operate inDish Network’s AWS-4 band, in the 2,000-2,020MHz and 2180-2,200MHz blocks.

Perlman and his new company, Artemis, hopes pCell technology can increase useable bandwidth by more than one hundred times. PCell stands for Personal Cell, and is based on a technology called Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO).

In a DIDO network, an additional server sits in the cloud, in a data center, in front of the web server. A special DIDO router (called a pWave) is used, and each device has to have a special DIDO receiver.

The DIDO server takes the data from the website and generates a special radio signal for your laptop. The signals are transmitted at the same time, from different routers. These signals, rather than interfering with each other, are actually summed together by the receiving devices. So, if there are 10 devices in the same area, they would receive all 10 DIDO signals at the same time, add them together, and somehow end up with just the data meant for them. Or something like that (pdf).

His team got pCell working with available LTE handsets, including the latest iPhones and Samsung smartphones, so that people would not need to buy new devices if their carrier uses his technology, reports the NY Times.

Artemis recently demonstrated a pCell system streaming multiple 4K Ultra HD video streams, using off-the-shelf Release 8 LTE dongles each using the same 10 MHz of spectrum.

Dish is targeting a summer debut for its Internet-TV service in the U.S., reports Bloomberg. Charlie Ergen’s Dish wants to sell a full package of live-streaming channels over the Web. Dish is targeting 18-to-34-year-olds who only want to pay $20 or $30 a month to watch video on smartphones and tablets.

The Artemis P-cell system – if it proves practical- would seem to be a good match for “wireless cable”.