There are few things more irritating than losing a cell phone signal in the middle of a task. Even worse? Those times where your smartphone ‘says’ it has 5 bars, yet your webpage refuses to load right when you need it most. With the arrival of startup company, Artemis’s pCell technology, 4G connectivity may soon be considered “the fast of the past”. It involves new transmitters that aim to work over 1 thousand times quicker than 4G by enhancing connectivity, as well as cutting mobile battery consumption. See, the main reason the dreaded ‘lost web signal’ disaster happens is due to one simple fact. We are all sharing the signal from a single cell tower. As soon as crowds gather and hop onto a shared tower to watch YouTube, make phone calls, and check emails, things get congested. And thats when your personal task goes kaput.

Cell towers, as we know them today, are like tops of umbrellas; cellular networks that use antennas to manipulate individual, large and carefully spaced cells. Once deployed, bubbles of reception remain, however the farther you get away from them the weaker the signal becomes. Rather than working against interference (as the current method acts), the pCell does something completely opposite by “exploiting interference”. Here, pWaves (radios) are put in massive amounts of boxes the size of routers. By having small, lower-powered connections scattered everywhere, congestion is far less likely. At the same time, speed is enhanced to the ultimate level. The company says the pCell will have its pWave units in an overlayed format, providing enough signal for each individual at all times.

Each pWave uses 1-milliwatt of power. To give some perspective, an entire tower provides a good 250-milliwatts. With impressive energy saving numbers such as these, expect a great big cut on infrastructure costs. pCells are easy to mount, need no tower, and run on Linux software! Another reason for its energy efficiency is the minimal time needed to search for a signal. Less searching equals less power used trying to make that connection. Although this sounds too good to be true, and Artemis has only demonstrated this in limited test conditions thus far, it plans a trial launch in San Francisco; across 350 rooftops. That would be enough to cover the entire city by the end of 2014. If successful, the company CEO, Steve Perlman says a global trial will follow in 2015.