Moore's Law will Lepfrog Today's Limits
This will not happen tomorrow. But like any technological vista, it illuminates the future. It opens the way to a new wireless paradigm, fully in place shortly after the turn of the century, that will mandate an entirely new model of wireless regulation and a new method for judging the evolution of companies and their prospects. In general, the companies on the path to broadband digital radios-the smart radio-will prevail over companies that hook their futures to hardwired machines linked to narrow spans of frequencies. Moore's law, the doubling of computer power every 18 months or so, is enabling the creation of broadband cellular radios in which most of the processing occurs in digital form.
Some of the first smart radios were built for the military. In Operation Desert Storm, the cacophony of allied combat radios-some 15 of them using a variety of frequencies, modulation techniques, encryption codes, and waveform standards, such as AM or FM or PCM (pulse code modulation)-created a virtual Babel in the sand. Units needed a separate radio system for every radio (or radar) standard. As a result, the Pentagon launched the Speakeasy project-one smart radio that could process all the different standards in software. Made by Hazeltine and TRW, the first prototypes were demonstrated successfully in 1994. Because standards change over time and hardware improves at the pace of Moore's law, a software programmable radio also saves money. Rather than upgrading the system in hardware every time the technology changes, software radios can be upgraded merely by downloading a new software module.
Speakeasy engineers have spread the word through the cellular industry. Stephen Blust, now at BellSouth Wireless, is leading an international effort to create smart radio standards-the MMITS project. Today, with the advance of an array of new digital technologies, including CDMA, TDMA, GSM, DECT 1900, SMR, PHS, and a spate of others, every urban area is becoming a Desert Storm of incompatible radios. Not only are these systems unable to communicate with one another, but they also require separate spectrum and base station equipment. All this redundant processing has raised the costs and reduced the universality of wireless and prevented cell phones from displacing wireline telephony.
The solution to complexity, however, is Moore's law: Put it on a chip. Reducing this Babel of complexity to silicon microchips, with hundreds of millions of transistors on centimeter slivers of sand that ultimately cost less than $2 to manufacture, smart radios can radically simplify the cellular landscape. Freed of most wires, poles, backhoes, trucks, workers, engineers, and rights of way, cellular should be far cheaper than wireline.
For example, the conventional analog base station that receives your cellular calls and connects them to the telephone network requires a million-dollar facility of 1,000 square feet. This structure may contain a central- office-style switch to link calls to the public switched telephone network, huge backup power supplies and batteries to handle utility breakdowns, and racks of radios covering every communications channel and modulation scheme used in the cell. This can add up to 416 radios, together with all the maintenance and expertise that multiple standards entail.
In the near future, one wideband radio will suffice. Digital signal processors ultimately costing a few dollars apiece and draining milliwatts of power will sort out all the channels, codes, modulation schemes, multipath signals, and filtering needs. Gone will be the large buildings, the racks of radios, the arrays of antennas, the specialized hardware processors. Gone will be the virtual honeycombs towering in the air in time and space with exclusive spectrum assignments and time slots, and possibly gone will even be the battalions of lawyers in the communications bar.
All this apparatus can be replaced by a programmable silicon base station in a briefcase, installed on any lamppost, elevator shaft, office closet, shopping mall ceiling, rooftop, or even a house. The result, estimated Don Cox of Stanford, the father of American PCS at Bellcore, could be a reduction of the capital costs of a wireless customer from an average of some $5,555 in 1994 to perhaps $14 after the turn of the century. That is a paradigm cliff of costs.
As smart radios (internal link) are delivered in the first years of the new century, they will allow escape from the zoo of conflicting protocols. Base stations will be programmable in software, able to handle any popular protocols, including the new technologies that will be emerging. The world of wireless will escape the bondage of air standards, where if you live in a GSM (global services mobile) area, you are forced to use GSM, and if you live in a CDMA (code division multiple access) area, your communications-poor cousins visiting from Europe will have to give up their GSM phone and demand to borrow yours (will they ever give it back?). Under the new regime, different standards mean different software loaded into RAM (random access memory) in real time. Any cell can accommodate a variety of access standards, channel assignments, and modulation schemes, and the best ones will win.