Femtocells To Replace Parts of the 3G Network

sweetpea23 writes "Grown-up versions of femtocells — devices which beef up 3G network strength in the home — are set to take over parts of the outdoor cellular networks, according to technology vendor picoChip. Femtocells — such as Vodafone UK's Sure Signal device — are cut-down versions of mobile phone base stations, redesigned to operate inside buildings, using home broadband networks to route 3G data onto the Internet. Now, picoChip, which claims to provide 70 percent of the chips used to make femtocells, has unveiled a toughened up version, which takes the femtocell idea back out onto the streets."

Comments

Problems

[Mr_Silver]

The biggest problem with femtocells is that customers expect them to be free. This isn't unreasonable, after all they're paying a monthly fee to get a service and they expect that they can stand in the bathroom in their city centre flat and be able to make a call.

The problem is that building a business case for purchasing a tonne of femtocells and giving them away to customers for nothing isn't a pretty read and getting a director to sign off on such an endeavour has been tough.

They'd far rather that the money was spent solving the signal problems (which improves things for everyone, not just the femtocell owner - but at the cost of a slow resolution time) rather than publicly admit that their signal is rubbish in urban places and needs "boosting".

Re:Problems

[TheRaven64]

That depends, of course, on who is deploying them. An existing ISP, for example, could deploy a cellular network pretty much instantly by providing the femtocells to their customers and buying capacity on an existing network.

A good candidate for doing that here in the UK would be Virgin Mobile, a virtual operator owned by Virgin Media, the largest ISP in the UK. If Virgin Media provided cable modems with built-in femtocells, they'd reduce their operating costs, because most calls in urban areas would be made within range of one of their cells, rather than having to use the Everything Everywhere network, but they could still fall back onto the EE network when out of range. They could encourage their customers to leave them turned on by paying them when a call was made through it (effectively also giving you cheaper calls when in your house).

My phone has WiFi, so I make calls via SIP when I am at home, using their network for the bandwidth but someone else for the POTS bridging. If they provided femtocells and a sane price structure, I'd be tempted to switch.

Re:Where to buy?

[PitaBred]

Not really weird. It's probably a legal requirement to have a GPS location of every cell on the network. AGPS, cell phone tracking and all that. The police wouldn't be happy with you being able to make cell calls from any network connection without being traceable, and AT&T probably wants to prevent overseas use as well.