'Adaptive Radio': The Next Big Thing in Wireless?

James Collier is loping in a broad circle on the Midsummer Common in Cambridge, England, holding aloft a two-foot fiberglass antenna. Cables snake from the antenna to a flat green box about the size of a vinyl record sleeve, which he’s carrying in a backpack. About 10 yards away, another antenna and another green box are connected to a laptop, receiving Collier’s signal and tracing his oval-shaped path on a map. “Of course,” he says, “this will all be much smaller.”

Collier runs Neul, the Cambridge startup that makes the green boxes, which house a new technology called “adaptive radio.” Today, anything that transmits long-range signals over the airwaves—radios, cell phones, television networks—broadcasts on a single, fixed frequency. Think of the 106.7 that appears on your radio dial. Both broadcaster and listener have to be tuned to the same wave. Each cell phone, similarly, has its own allotted frequency to communicate with nearby towers. Carriers must spend billions to license chunks of spectrum to make sure their subscribers can connect wherever they go.