Mobile dead zones can be a real pain, especially in areas where they seemingly shouldn't exist, like in large cities.

In the near future, however, these dead zones might be covered with solar-powered boxes that can easily be placed on things like buildings to fill in these gaps.

"One of the challenging things with wireless signals is really the building infrastructure," said Thierry Klein, head of research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs, in an interview with Fast.Coexist. "The signal strength depends on obstacles that might be in its path."

Mobile companies have wanted to deploy smaller cell nodes for a number of years now, however, the main obstacle has been the fact that they have to be hard-wired into the power grid in order to run properly.

Using solar power is a great solution for this, but it poses another issue; in order for cell nodes to run, they would need to be connected to huge solar panels. To fix this, engineers at Bell Labs had to significantly minimize the usage of cell nodes themselves. Once they did that, the solar panels powering the nodes could be much smaller. In fact, the solar panels are almost invisible, sitting on the side of the small box.

The design of the box also makes it very easy to install, meaning that it will be far less likely to run into mobile dead spots in a city.

The technology is also a way for telecommunications companies to use far less energy, with the boxes using around 10 times less energy than other, comparable systems. The new system falls in line with the vision of the future that telecommunications companies have, offering extremely low-power solutions.

Via: Fast.Coexist