An Introduction to ArrayComm

What problem are we solving?

Customers are demanding significantly better performance from wireless gear.

Wireless service providers (also called "operators" or "carriers", folks like Vodafone, T-Mobile, AT&T, DoCoMo, or SKT) compete for your business. As competition often does, this makes them tend to want to offer you more for less to win you over and keep you loyal. "More" means literally more talk time on your plan as well as a widening range of cool new services, such as helping you surf the Internet from your laptop virtually anywhere (eliminating all the hassles of this "WiFi hotspot" nonsense) or sending pictures to people with your mobile phone. "Less" means cheaper minutes, flat-rate plans, lower roaming charges, and so on. You as a subscriber win both ways, and just like the 1.3 billion other wireless users out there, you keep consuming more.

This causes problems for wireless operators. They need to constantly squeeze more performance out of their wireless technologies in order to make the new services possible and keep the current ones profitable. This affects the phones and laptop cards you use as well as the equipment operators have to put all over town (and everywhere else) to communicate with you over the air and keep you connected as you move through your day. To continue making business sense, the equipment on both ends of the communication link needs to reach further, send more information faster, and serve more subscribers. This is where we come in. While many companies are focused on supplying wireless operators and their subscribers with the latest fashion in phone shape and "air interface" — i.e. the radio "language" the wireless device uses to communicate over the air — we solve the fundamental equipment-performance problem.

How do we do that?

We help wireless devices listen more carefully and speak more clearly — resulting in multiple-fold improvements in performance.

Explaining this directly gets too complicated and technical, so we prefer to use a couple of simple analogies. You may have noticed that in a crowded room you can focus your hearing on the person with whom you're speaking and effectively ignore the conversations around you. Conversely, if you're trying to get the attention of someone down the street, you can cup your hands around your mouth, directing your voice to improve the odds of being heard and understood.

It turns out that almost all current wireless communication systems have no such capabilities. They waste incredible amounts of energy effectively "shouting" over the radio signal din to be heard (worsening the din in the process), listening to everyone at once, or talking in all directions so that distant listeners can't hear a thing. They still work, but our human auditory processing example suggests they could work much, much better.

We've shown through extensive commercial deployments that they can. Our software helps wireless systems listen more carefully and speak more clearly. And by "more", we don't mean 10% or 20% better — we're talking about doubling or quadrupling (or more) the performance of these systems. It starts with putting more than one antenna on one or both ends of the communication link, in effect giving these devices and systems more ears for selective listening and hands to cup around their mouths for directed speech. Then using our software to process signals to and from those antennas, we provide substantial improvements to overall performance. Wireless gear with our software and multiple antennas can indeed reach further, send more information faster, and serve more subscribers. Problem solved.

Who benefits?

Subscribers get better services, operators get lower costs, and wireless equipment manufacturers win more deals.

We show more details on this in our A‑MAS: What and Why? section — but the basics come down to better subscriber experiences, lower costs for operators, and product performance advantages for equipment manufacturers.

Better subscriber experiences . . . When the device you use to communicate wirelessly takes advantage of our software, you get better call quality, more coverage, and (if you're using your device to access the Internet or a corporate network) faster download and upload speeds. Because of the next item on the benefits list, your wireless operator is also more likely to roll out cool new services faster and more broadly, so the pace of increase in the number of new things you can do wirelessly (whether for productivity or for fun) will accelerate.

Lower costs . . . The significant performance gains from using our software mean that every dollar a wireless operator spends on building and operating a network will go further — i.e. each dollar worth of network will cover more territory, support more sophisticated services, and make room for more subscribers. This helps operators offer you more for less and stay in business while they're at it.

Competitive edge . . . Just as wireless operators compete for your business, the wireless equipment manufacturing community competes fiercely for the operators' business. Wireless equipment enabled by ArrayComm software enjoys a significant performance edge over conventional designs. And since our software takes advantage of our more than 15 years of experience with real-world, commercial operation of these "multi-antenna" concepts, manufacturers who choose to team with us enjoy lower development costs, reduced technical risk, and ultimately higher product performance than they would have experienced trying to figure this all out themselves.

For more information about the wireless systems with which we work, read on here, and for a more technical explanation of the solution, browse here.