Goodbye Cell Towers?

Depending on your age you might remember (or not) how when the power went out, your cordless land line phone went out too. Those phones and many other land line phones (the kind plugged into a jack in your wall) have been becoming obsolete with the technological advance of the cell phone and more recently the smart phone. Even I have ditched the land line thinking why pay for something I don’t use. Well the next obsolete thing down the proverbial technological road might be cell phone towers. There’s a new technology that allows smartphones to communicate with other mobile devices up to a range of 500 meters, bypassing cell towers altogether and it is called LTE Direct. This new stuff, already being used by the military, uses something called licensed spectrum and doesn't drain a phone's battery life. It will become commercially available in 2016, which given how time flies, is right around the corner. In the immediate future LTE enabled devices have the potential to become competitive for fallback public safety networks that must function when cellular networks are not available or fail too, like when hurricanes, earthquakes, or other disasters topple towers or clog up the system with more call than can be handled. But in the longer run this technology could mean goodbye cell towers. I think they’re eyesores in our landscape anyway so I know I won’t miss them.