[MrBuddyCasino]

Can you elaborate why it wouldn't work in a wide area setting? In a demonstration, they had a lot of cellphones on a desk, but not a matching number of pCell antennas, so it seems they can support many devices with a single (or at least much less) antenna.

Or do you mean to say that the beam forming is not going to work over large distances, so phones must be in close proximity to the antennas?

[KaiserPro]

the system will work over long distances, indeed he claims in the paper (with nothing to back it up, that paper is extra-ordinarily vague.)

However it wont increase bandwidth. (I should have been more precise) The only reason why people are interested in this is because it offers the idea of greater bandwidth.

The way they increase bandwidth is effectively partitioning the local airspace off from the wider world. Each cell (be it TV, phone or $other) can deliver x bandwith.

The bigger the area covered by the cell, the less bandwidth per unit of volume. (conversely the smaller the more bandwidth per volume)

This is before we start doing clever things like spread spectrum or account for signal loss/noise/shannon's law

This is pretty much snake oil. Its beam forming with a marketing budget. There is nothing in that paper that suggests otherwise

[noselasd]

Just as a sidenote, LTE can also use beamforming, over rather large distances. How well implemented this is in current gear , I don't know.