It's still snake oil. What they're designing is called a thinned phased array, or sparse phased array, see figure 19 in the white paper. Such design suffers from a major flaw known to any radar engineer: The Thinned Array curse. It even has a wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinned-array_curse

In layman terms, >99% of the power transmitted is lost to sidelobes and doesn't reach the intended users (1-a/A power is lost, if you want to get technical). Such design can carry a small number of users, operating very close to the environment noise floor. The maximum allowed number of users is approximately proportional to the number of transmitters. Each user added above this limit decrease the SNR for all users in the system, killing the communication for everyone. Not a sound design for a cellular system.

Phased-array design is complex and not always intuitive. Whoever invested in this company hasn't done proper due diligence.

Sorry, I don't think you are correct. What they are building is not just another phased-array system, and I don't think they are even doing any beamforming at each transmitter at all.

Instead, they are looking at a much more difficult task, of using constructive and destructive interference from distributed transmitters to only cohere the signal at a single point around the receiving antenna. Think CDMA, but spatially (like in 3d space).

> Radio frequency design and phased array design is complex and not always intuitive. Whoever invested in this company hasn't done proper due diligence.

One of the problems with what they are doing is that it is so new and flies in the face of decades of radio theory, which as you state is already incredibly difficult. Please give it another look, this video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bO0tjAdOIw

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing about this being snake oil... but how do you think phased-array and beam forming work if not by controlling phase delays between antennas so as to create constructive and destructive interference at a desired point, or points, in space?

Even if the air interface works the main reason I can see for carriers not deploying this is backhaul. It would be exponentially more expensive (35x if the air interface is indeed 35x faster) to provide bandwidth to all devices. Right now carriers actually rely on the LTE total cap limitation to save money on backhaul costs.

> how do you think phased-array and beam forming work if not by controlling phase delays between antennas so as to create constructive and destructive interference at a desired point, or points, in space?

I consider DIDO separate from a phased array in that each transmitter has its own separately transmitted signal to do the interfering, instead of one phase-shifted copy of the signal.

Artemis/pCell is definitely not a phased array in that sense.

This could make the backhaul problem even worse- because in order to get that 35x bandwidth , you have to transport ALL that data to a large group of base-stations,unlike today where you transport data only to the relevant base-station.

On the other hand, if a company invented a new wireless technology, it's probably smart enough to be aware of the back haul problem.

I don't know how loosely you want to apply the term "beamforming" but there are ways to send data over multiple antennas for multiple users that allows the signal to be recovered for each user independently even if the signals nominally appear to be interfering.

"Constructive and destructive interference from distributed transmitters" is basically the definition of a sparse phased array... and it suffers from the Thinned Array Curse. Every radio engineer sooner or later re-discovers this classic "curse" :)

These aren't naive phased arrays systems and if the performance really were worse as you imply no one would use MIMO.