Radio Revolutionaries

Vanu, a small Cambridge, Mass.-based company, has developed a cellular base station that can simultaneously process two waveforms - CDMA and GSM - all in software running on off-the-shelf computer servers. This would allow cellphone carriers to handle calls based on more than one telecom standard with a single base station. The key benefit offered by this technology is that it replaces costly radio equipment with much smaller, off-the-shelf servers running specialized code. Monitoring and troubleshooting can also be handled remotely, and upgrades involve simple software uploads, rather than expensive hardware overhauls