[Discuss-gnuradio] Vanu in Wired

[Steve Schear]

[The following is from a single column piece on page 38 of the Feb. 2002 
print issue of Wired (not posted by them online yet).  I've sent off a 
reply, based on John's Draft Letter, to the author.  I'll post his 
response, if or when it arrives.  Steve]

Download Your Cell Phone!

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 addons 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 garagedoor 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 soupedup phone will really be a 
generalpurpose 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, nonsoftware phones are likely to be 
fastfading anachronisms.