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Cooper is an unrelenting iconoclast. Twenty-seven years ago, at the age of 43, he stood on a street corner in Manhattan and placed the world's first phone call using a cellular handset. It was a clunky, two-pound prototype called Dyna-Tac that Cooper himself designed at Motorola, under the skeptical watch of some of the top brass. At that time, in April, 1973, both Motorola and AT&T were pushing the Federal Communications Commission to allocate radio spectrum for car phones. But to Cooper, the cellular revolution wasn't about automobiles. It was about people using phones on the street or in stores or wherever they wanted. Now, says Cooper, "history is repeating itself, with the Internet." All around the world, cellular operators and handset makers are rushing to perfect a so-called third-generation of cellular technology, which is supposed to let people on mobile phones access the Net at speeds up to two megabits per second. It was the dream of such "3G" phones that fueled the white-hot airwave auctions in Britain last month. In total, service providers such as Vodafone spent $35 billion dollars for slices of 3G radio spectrum. But in Cooper's contrarian view, these bidders are heading for a bitter disappointment. "3G will be a useful voice solution, but it does little for data," he says. ALPHABET SOUP. What does Marty know that others have yet to find out? In a nutshell, he says, conventional cellular technology can't fight physics. "We have wasted billions of dollars trying to improve the air interfaces," he declares, referring to GSM, TDMA, CDMA, W-CDMA, and the rest of the alphabet soup of competing global cellular standards. "Using cellular spectrum in these conventional ways, you can only squeeze so much information into a given channel," Cooper continues. "All the wild hype about 3G will end up yielding to reality." Enter ArrayComm. The company was founded in 1992 in San Jose, Calif., by French telecom entrepreneur Arnaud Saffari and Stanford University radio engineer Richard Roy. Armed with SDI grants, Roy had invented a set of mathematical algorithms for "smart antennas" -- arrays of receivers and transmitters that excelled at extracting faint radio signals from a cacophony of noise, ground clutter, and intentional signal jamming. The algorithms weren't powerful enough to overcome SDI's myriad technical problems. But Saffari and Roy saw that the technology would be ideal for cutting through radio interference and boosting the capacity of cellular networks, which would soon be groaning under the weight of millions of new subscribers. The one thing Saffari and Roy lacked was a big name in the wireless industry to run the company and persuade investors to sign onto the plan. That big name was Cooper -- whose own experience convinced him that smart antennas were the route to the future. Raised in Chicago, Cooper received an electrical-engineering degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After four years in the Navy, he joined Motorola in 1954, building portable police radios and eventually heading up the company's research in cellular.
What Cooper is referring to is the fine art of painting a geographic area with very precise, low-power transmissions of energy. When transmitting voice conversations, cellular base stations furnished with ArrayComm's smart antennas take signals received from the handsets of hundreds of different simultaneous users and apply high-speed signal processing to reduce the interference that each user experiences. Data is handled in the same fashion: Instead of broadcasting information to all users across a wide area, ArrayComm's antennas create a "virtual wire" between the transmitter and the receiver, carefully directing the data to the location of the individual who requires it. The technology has a proven track record in Japan. Starting in the early 1990s, a group of Japanese companies, including electronics giant Kyocera Corp., began deploying a low-cost digital cellular system known as Personal Handy System, or PHS. Instead of depending on a small number of large, powerful, and expensive base stations, as most of today's digital-cellular systems do, PHS uses lots of small and inexpensive antennas scattered throughout a city. The service took off quickly, and within two years of its launch, the network was supporting 7 million subscribers. Trouble was, the network was only designed to serve 2 million people. Users experienced dropped calls, and PHS phones acquired a reputation as cheap, low-cost alternatives to normal cell phones. PEEPHOLE PORTAL. To fix the problem, PHS service providers started deploying ArrayComm software and hardware at their base stations. "Within a year," says Cooper, "we were serving millions of subscribers, and the capacity of the system had increased 10 times." Analysts in Tokyo confirm that the service has improved. But with other cellular services booming, it may be too late to rescue PHS. Back in San Jose, Cooper and his colleagues are shifting their focus to a market that could be much larger: the wireless Internet. The company has designed a data-only version of its technology, called "I-burst." Now, working with makers of handheld computers, MP3 players, and other devices, ArrayComm wants to take palm-based computing into the broadband era. Cooper says a leap like that is sorely needed. Palm VII devices from Palm Inc., for example, offer a modicum of Internet access. But they can only cruise a limited number of specially prepared Web sites. And they surf at a plodding 9.6 kilobits per second. Other companies in the U.S., including cellular services, are starting to offer the same kinds of access. "But this is the equivalent of taking a wide-screen, panoramic, stereophonic movie, and watching it through the peephole of your apartment door," says Cooper. ArrayComm antennas, if they were widely deployed, could quickly lift that speed to one megabit per second, Cooper believes. VOTE OF CONFIDENCE. Cooper says 3G phones will never be able to deliver that kind of speed to a large number of subscribers. And many other engineers are inclined to agree. "You won't be watching 90-minute movies on your 3G phone," says Mark F. Bregman, general manager of IBM's pervasive computing business, which is in charge of the company's thrust in wireless. But with smart antennas, a network of handheld computers might be able to deliver such services, according to Cooper. At the very least, he says, "you'll be able to download a five-minute song in about 20 seconds, wherever you are. If you could do that, why would you buy another CD?" Funny he should mention music. Last month, ArrayComm won a big vote of confidence from one of the world's most popular vendor of gadgets, games, and music: Sony Corp. Last year, Sony backed out of the U.S. cell-phone market, having failed to win significant market share. Now, Sony has taken an $8 million stake in ArrayComm, and Sony's new president, Kunitake Ando, has identified wireless Web access as a top companywide priority. While ArrayComm has yet to kick-start its business in the U.S., the company has had no trouble attracting top-tier engineers. Three months ago, it lured one of the best radio engineers at Lucent's Bell Labs, Nitin Shah, to serve as ArrayComm's executive vice-president and general manager of Internet products. And the company will soon announce a new raft of partnerships. Arraycomm faces all the usual investment and marketing hurdles, just like any other startup. But with a man like Cooper at the helm, it's never very hard to get one foot in the door. Gross covers the technology industry for Business Week in New York |
