Future Focus

When Martin Cooper talks, tech people listen. After all, in 1973, Cooper invented the first cell phone small enough to use outside a car, forever changing the way the world lives and works. But today, some think this wry, lively elder statesman, now 75, is working to undermine the very mobile behemoths he helped create. That's because he's the founder and chairman of ArrayComm, a San Jose, California, company that has radically redesigned the antennae that send cellular signals to handsets — it may be a better product, but it's also a threat to some hundreds of billions of dollars invested by the mobile giants. He is overhauling the way wireless signals travel, ushering in what he calls the "revolutionary next stage in radio communications.''

Cooper is one of the World Economic Forum's 2005 Technology Pioneers who are helping the next generation of broadband and portable communications conquer the world. Along with other upstarts like Britain's Frontier Silicon, Israel's Wisair and Cornice from the U.S., ArrayComm is working to improve technologies already in use — like wi-fi and 3G — in order to give people wire-free access to e-mail and the Internet, and to provide them with cheap phone calls in the U.S., Europe, China and Korea, among other places. Between the four of them, they're pretty much covering the globe.

Wi-fi (wireless fidelity) is the cable-free technology that lets people surf websites and check e-mail while sitting in a Starbucks, an airport lounge, a hotel lobby, a city park or anywhere close to an antenna. The technology has grown dramatically in recent years: French research firm IDATE counts 130,000 hot spots in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and U.K. research group Analysys predicts that by 2009 there will be over 38 million wi-fi subscribers in the U.S. and Western Europe alone. Most observers believe that its next big step will be the introduction of WiMAX, a technology developed by Intel that, as soon as next year, should blanket not just coffee shops but entire cities.

But while the world waits for WiMAX, wireless operators in Sydney, Johannesburg, Paris and the Bay Area are already deploying ArrayComm's new antenna design, to the dismay of mobile carriers. Conventional mobile antennae, Cooper says, "are really just a bunch of sticks — we make them smart.'' Where conventional masts send out signals in circular arcs — a process that wastes transmission power because only the signals that hit a phone are used — an ArrayComm antenna transmits signals in a straight line, targeting a particular phone that it recognizes using specialized software. Cooper says ArrayComm's software, which resides in computers at transmitting base stations, can reach 40 times more people than conventional antennae, and cost six times less to deploy. For now, ArrayComm seems to be leaping ahead of WiMAX.