No, not her. But Distributed-In-Distributed-Out. I’ve often thought that current cellular-derived systems (CDMA, EVDO, UMTS, LTE, etc) were insanely complex at the radio/protocol level. WiMAX is less complex than the gigantic hairball of UMTS/LTE that all the telcos coughed up since it comes from the IEEE instead of the ETSI/3GPP groups, but it’s certainly not simple. I mean, look at the AT command specifications for UMTS or LTE; there’s just so much there for setting up bearers for this and bearers for that, QoS for whatever, latency requirements, etc. I can’t imagine having to program a radio protocol stack like the team at OpenBTS is doing. It’s all there because the radio channel is shared spectrum and voice calls are still the most important part. If you can’t make a voice call because some douchebag is watching Youtube, you’d be pissed. And for whatever reason they still haven’t figured out how to reliably do VOIP over 4G networks leading to stuff like Circuit Switched Fallback and (for Verizon) using the CDMA 1x network for voice and the LTE network for data. Wouldn’t it be great to keep things simple?
And that’s where Rearden and OnLive come in. Over the past 10 years they decided to throw out everything the ETSI, 3GPP, and 3GPP2 think they know about wireless, and rebuild it from the ground up. All because they need a really low-latency, cheap, reliable wireless medium to play games over. And I hope they make it work because it would really disrupt the existing wireless incumbents with their layers upon layers of protocols and complexity and crap and eye-bulging prices for wireless data. And the fact that it appears so freakishly simple on the client side makes my life easier since we don’t have to do all sorts of stupid setup just to send a single IP packet over the network. Here’s to the future…