that segment of the new market.
X: Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs and other executives have been talking about reaching the theoretical limits of wireless networks and looking for other ways to increase efficiency. So what’s new on that front?
BD: If you look at how we’ve increased capacity in the network over the last few years, we’re kind of at the theoretical limits of the physics on radio. So we’ve done things. If you can remove interference from the network it frees up capacity for more voice, so we’ve put interference cancellations in the phones. If you put multiple antennas in the handset you can affect capacity that way, and so we’ve done that.
X: Are those new technologies?
BD: Those are incremental gains. The whole premise we’ve been talking about is the closer you can get the network to the device, you have this exponential effect in increasing capacity.
Today mostly we see these devices called femtocells being sold as a coverage fill-in. But enough of those boxes in the network will actually cause interference. They’ll interfere with each other. So some of what we’re working on is just the intelligence needed. They’re going to need to be smart enough to talk to each other to adjust their power levels up and down as new devices are added, to know what’s around them and the environment around them. So that’s one part of the solution, what we call heterogeneous networks.
One alternate technology is called FlashLinq. It’s about device discovery [that enables] our phones to exchange data locally right here in this room rather than going all the way back through the network and being switched and taking up that capacity and spectrum.
Then we have AllJoyn, which is a software solution for peer-to-peer, where we all might want to play a multi-player game. One person can access it through Bluetooth, another from WiFi and not have to go back through the server routing. So we’re really focused on how do we offload [certain kinds of data traffic] from the existing spectrum to enable more of it to be used when necessary for wide area applications. Because spectrum is a scarce resource and we think this will be a kind of ever-present problem.
