Sell your telecommunications company shares! First we had the threat of the Internet Phone (CI No 2,687), now an American Fork, Utah company claims to have a wireless transmission technology so efficient, capacious and cheap that it says a major telecommunications company has offered it $500m for any patents awarded – just so that it can kill the thing. The company is International Automated Systems Inc, and it calls its technology Digital Wave Modulation, although unfortunately, since it is still waiting for patents, it is not prepared to say much about it, although it sounds like a variant of phase modulation in which both amplitude and frequency are modulated: at the GigaHertz speeds of cellular systems, an awful lot of digital traffic could be carried on each subchannel in even a fairly narrow band. The company, which developed a system for retail grocers and then developed a fingerprint identification system from it, says the system needs no interface, something that appears to be crucial to its operation, and cellular base stations would only need an add-in board costing as little as $6,000, and something as simple as a PC Card could be used at the receiving end. It runs at 1.8G-bytes per second – does that mean it operates in the 14.4GHz band? – and the company claims a single Pentium personal computer could switch 150,000 phone lines, and over 1,000 per sonal computers could communicate with each other concurrently on one band. It is also claimed to use bandwidth 1,000 times more efficiently than Time or Code Division Multiple Access digital cellular, while a single analogue broadcast television channel could carry 900 Digital Wave Modulation channels. Vice-president of sales and marketing Curtis Snow said the company would not sell the technology, but wants to work in partnership with interested firms.
