New Antenna Tech Could Make Your Phone Signal Ridiculously Strong

Scientists at MIT want to blanket your next-generation smartphone in a material made of antennas. Their goal is to turn the idea of 5G into as efficient a reality as possible. The team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will present its new material, which is called RFocus, at a conference later this month.

RFocus is emblematic of a general shift in development of wireless technology and devices. Instead of just covering the Earth with a sporadic arrangement of huge antennas, engineers also want a more homogeneous network of smaller antennas to keep signals consistent and high powered. The idea is to turn “multiple input multiple output,” or MIMO, into massive MIMO. But what does MIMO really mean and do?

Let’s say you have an entire cellular data network in your city, but there’s just one transmitter and one receiver. Suddenly your network is like having a single landline phone for an entire apartment building, with a clear bottleneck point that prevents information from traveling for everyone but the one person using the phone at a time.