Pivotal Commware Will Start Selling Its Software-Defined Antenna for Holographic Beamforming This Year
Posted on February 12, 2018
Today’s cell towers serve as beacons of mobile service, screaming their signal out in all directions for any devices close enough to benefit. This approach has worked fine for the most part, but in a future with more advanced phones packed more tightly together on a 5G network, towers will need to make better use of their allocated radio frequencies.
A new type of cell signaling called holographic beamforming [PDF], developed by a company called Pivotal Commware, could soon replace the old way. A low-cost improvement upon existing phased array beamforming and multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas, holographic beamforming has the potential to target and follow individual or small clusters of devices and provide them with their own high-fidelity beams of radiofrequency (RF) energy.