BFD
Your cell phone is living on borrowed time. Every 18 months, Americans trash their cells and buy new ones. Europeans do so every 12 months, and the Japanese every 9. But the whole upgrade cycle could change in the next three or four years.
Instead of buying a new unit and getting a whole host of innovative features - some useful, others not - you might click into a Web site and download the specific add-ons you want, paying a price for the new functions as you go. What's more, these might be really cool extras - like an AM/FM radio or a garage-door opener. They'll be software packages that change the way your cell phone modulates and interprets radio frequencies. They'll let your US cell phone switch its operating frequencies and roam a European or Japanese network. That's because your souped-up phone will really be a general-purpose computer, running a software radio program. And in all likelihood, that program will have been written largely by Vanu Bose, son of Amar Bose, the legendary designer of speakers and stereo systems.
The idea grew out of the MIT SpectrumWare project, which in 1996 produced the first working software radio outside the military. Two years later, Vanu and five friends took $200,000 of their own money and set up a small company called Vanu Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to commercialize the technology.
In the fall of 1998, Boeing asked the firm to join its consortium, which was competing for the military's Joint Tactical Radio System project to create a single radio architecture for all of the US armed services.
Ultimately, Vanu hopes to be the Dolby of the software radio world - to develop critical technology that others license and build into their products. The first commercial deployment is likely to be at cell phone towers, which will let carriers switch from standard to standard as needed. Next will be cars, which have more electrical power and space than wireless handsets do. By the end of the decade, non-software phones are likely to be fast-fading anachronisms.
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