The 5G race is quickly shaping up to be as much of a wild west as the battle over IoT standards, but one of the lesser-known players, Artemis Networks, is getting their day in the sun at CES thanks to Dish. Having been around since 2014 without much fanfare, Artemis Networks has done their fair share of revolutionary research and garnered a somewhat respectable customer base, but has never really been in the public eye or made headlines in the tech world. Having their technology shown at CES, especially with the dual fame factors of being part of the 5G race and being affiliated with Dish bolstering their showing.
Among the various possible 5G networking standards out there, you have standards that are strictly determined on the hardware side and have the advantage of being highly optimized for performance and power usage. These are, by and large, most of what has dominated the wireless industry until now. On the other hand, there are software standards that are highly adaptable, and can be integrated with vast arrays of different hardware. Artemis Networks’ darling creation, pCell technology, is somewhat of a blend of the two, with specialized hardware optimized for a highly adaptable software-side standard.
In testing, pCell has managed to beam high-speed mobile broadband to a number of devices concentrated in a small area, though to say that their pursuits in the 5G arena are in their infancy is a bit of an understatement. The potential is there mainly due to the special pWave hardware that they use for pCell; the most recent iteration of it is stripped of many basic wireless features and shrunk down to the size of a standard power cable, allowing it to be deployed just about anywhere. The missing features, such as GPS, are made up for on the software side through outsourcing and creative coding. Dish’s relationship with Artemis that led to this development runs fairly deep, despite the pair not having been together that long; in a symbiotic sort of arrangement, Dish is leasing spectrum out to Artemis for their pet projects, and Artemis is supplying pCell technology to Dish for delivering cable and broadband, which they’re currently using in real-world field trials in some markets.