It was almost three years ago that Steve Perlman began courting controversy by promising something of a wireless technology panacea. A relentless entrepreneur and inventor, he unveiled a prototype called DIDO. The technology would do away with wireless network congestion by giving each smartphone and tablet its own superfast connection instead of asking these devices to share bandwidth pumped out by a cell tower.
Steve Perlman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur behind technologies like WebTV and OnLive, knows how to captivate an audience. On Wednesday, Perlman revealed a wireless technology he’s been working on for 10 years: pCell. VentureBeat attended the unveiling at Columbia University, Perlman’s alma mater, after which we spoke with him to learn more about the “transformative” technology. In front of an audience of students, journalists, and business leaders at Columbia, Perlman showed eight iPhones streaming HD video sharing just 5 MHz of spectrum. Then, in another application of pCell, he demonstrated multiple 4K streams (of Netflix’s House of Cards) using 10 MHz of spectrum.