The annual NExTWORK conference, held in June, is an interdisciplinary meeting of the minds; business leaders, technology innovators, and other leaders in the data-sharing business. Among them was Steve Perlman, the founder of OnLive, a cloud-based on-demand gaming service that many have lauded as a "game-changer" in the world of online gaming. However, it wasn't so much Perlman's gaming network that grabbed attention, but his claims that he is developing a revolutionary new radio broadcast system. He calls the system DIDO, and promises it will revolutionize wireless networking as we know it.

     According to Popular Science, DIDO (distributed input-distributed output) supposed allows users to access the full-bandwidth of a service tower, compared to the broadband we use now in which users access a small percentage of the whole bandwidth available from each tower. Likewise, the towers will change as well, becoming stations no larger than a "standard router". Well, what about all of the signal obstructions? Wireless uses broadband radio towers because they are built up above pesky things like buildings and hills that block radio transmissions. According to Perlman, his new DIDO system's stations can broadcast through solid materials that would normally block signals. In addition, his DIDO stations can broadcast much farther than traditional towers, about 30 miles farther, at which point he says, "they'd be dealing witht he curvature of the Earth." Of course, these new stations would be able to broadcast through that. Essentially, the new DIDO system would allow users to exponentially improve their access, speed, and availability to wireless networks while significantly reducing cost and production. Perlman's DIDO system sounds like cold fusion, perpetual lightbulbs, and the everlasting gobstopper all rolled in to one.

     As exciting as his dramatic claims may be, they're equally baseless. Perlman provided no demonstrations or even real evidence of the DIDO system's capabilities at the NExTWORK Conference. Furthermore, his claims fly in the face of established laws of physics regarding wireless networks and radio transmission. The Shannon-Hartley Theorem, named for Claude Shannon and Ralph Hartley, illustrates the maximum speed at which data can travel on a communications line of a specified bandwidth. A little like someone claiming Einstein's law that lightspeed travel is impossible if a thing has mass, Perlman claims he has broken the "bandwidth barrier" of data transmission. Wired magazine interviewed an electrical engineering professor who acknowledged that with the advent of 4G technology, some of the Shannon-Hartley Theorem has been disproved. However, this is not a glowing endorsement of the validity of Perlman's DIDO system, which he says has been in the works for 10 years.

     Perlman has already patented the technology and, working with researchers at Rearden, claim that they have been able to increase speeds of up to 10 times, and are working toward speeds of 100 times that of regular broadband. Should DIDO work and become commercially viable, it would change the landscape of wireless networking as we know it. No more dropped calls, no more dead spots, and everyone would have a pipeline to their networks for split-second downloads. If DIDO's possible, maybe we will be looking at a future with cold fusion reactors providing electricity for free and lightbulbs that never burn out.