Ethertronics, a technology company enabling innovative antenna and RF system solutions to deliver connected experiences, has announced that the company has completed successful trials of its Active Steering™ solution with Tier One carriers in the United States and Europe. This solution has been designed to maximize throughput and reliability in 3G and 4G (LTE and LTE-Advanced) wireless devices, Ethertronics’ Active Steering solution was able to achieve significant spectral efficiency gains of 30 percent on two different LTE networks.
Active Steering is designed to address a wide range of wireless issues including capacity, emissions, device size and SAR management. Active Steering generates multiple radiation patterns from a single antenna structure, providing the benefits of multiple antennas, in a small footprint, accessible for today’s “thin” devices. Active Steering’s proprietary algorithm samples and switches between the multiple radiation patterns, selecting the best one for that specific environment (cell edge versus near cell tower in the case of a cell phone). The technology removes the need to move your phone around in low signal areas in an attempt get a strong enough signal to connect to the network. As a result, the users benefit from better connectivity, increased download speeds and improved experience while wireless carriers benefit from increased spectral efficiency, decreasing the burden on the network. While Active Steering is designed for implementation into small wireless devices such as smartphones, tablets and more, other tests show significant throughput improvement in larger devices such as routers.
As data use increases, cellular operators need to find new ways to make the most out of their 3G and 4G networks. Active Steering enables them to increases network spectral efficiency by improving the capabilities of the devices themselves. The alternative to this is adding expensive cellular infrastructure or buying more spectrum both of which can be costly and in some cases nearly impossible.
Active Steering technology is unique in that it allows carriers to capitalize on the opportunities for 4G by enabling the device to be the catalyst for optimizing their networks. The trials that we conducted, with Tier One carriers both here in the U.S. and in Europe, showed that carriers can gain an average of 30 percent spectral efficiency when Active Steering technology is integrated into a device. These gains alone can have a major effect on a carrier’s CapEx and OpEx budgets. The carriers, who trialed this solution, were very excited with the results and are already in talks with OEMs to integrate our Active Steering technology into their devices. We are all pursuing the same goal of providing the best user experience. Active Steering automatically provides the best signal strength instead of the user having to move their cell phone in different directions hoping to get a strong enough signal to connect to the network. Ethertronics also makes it easy for OEMs to implement this solution since they offer a complete solution with offices around the world able to implement our antenna architecture, RFIC and algorithm.
This patented, game-changing, technology combines Ethertronics’ patented Isolated Magnetic Dipole™ (IMD) antenna technology with its active antenna systems approach. For all applications, Active Steering enables device vendors to use noticeably better performance and reliability to significantly differentiate their smartphones, tablets and other devices. This is critical in today’s ultra-competitive market.
In addition, Active Steering provides more degrees of freedom through IoT/M2M networking by enabling sub-networking, as well as layer structuring, on a semi point-to-point communication system. Ethertronics’ patent portfolio has significantly more depth than what is seen from a standard antenna company. Ethertronics has been in stealth mode for a long time on this technology in order to secure patents at multiple-levels. The benefits of this disruptive technology are being demonstrating step-by-step, with many more to come.
The Active Steering trials clocked more than 2,000 hours of field test data collected over a period of 2.5 months on active LTE networks.
