[Hands0n]

It is a reasonably long-anticipated piece of technology, the Femtocell. This is a small device that sits on any Internet connection (typically ADSL or Cable) and delivers a 2G or 3G "cell" in the local area of a home or office. Designed for individual use each Femtocell is intended for the SOHO or home user.

As a solution Femtocell technology could very well spell the end of the mobile network blackspot in people's homes and workplaces. It will not, of course, address the shortcomings of inadequate national deployment of mainstream 2G and 3G cell towers. But this Femtocells will definitely have an appeal for those who live and work in marginal areas.

It seems to me, from what I've read so far, that Femtocells will be dedicated to individual network operators. That suggests that a family using more than one mobile network operator could very well need to install several Femtocells. That is assuming equally poor coverage at that location.

One of the leading trialists of the technology is reportedly O2 which commenced in the UK in 2008 (http://www.binfo.co.uk/2008/04/16/o2-starts-uk-femtocell-trial/) with an expectation that commercial availability will be in 2009. Could this be why they have not pushed as hard to get their 3G network rolled out as wide as the ther mobile network operators?

It is an interesting and exciting technology for sure. I would certainly be inclined to adopt this at home where O2's signal (3G and 2G) is, frankly, pathetic. But will things be any better across a Cable or ADSL service? Particularly given ADSL's propensity to drop connections (re-sync) and suffer all manner of other issues. How, for example, will voice carry over ADSL when configured as GDMP vs Fastpath. The former delivers very good quality data at the cost of line-level retries causing increased latency? The retries are fine for data but do not bode well for carrying voice. Gamers hate it as it affects their ping times. The solution is to ask your ISP to switch your service to Fastpath (if on ADSL2+), but there is no guarantee they will. And so if not you may find that the voice delivery of Femtocell across ADSL will be unacceptable with voice dropouts, jitter, pauses and suchlike.

Is Femtocell, then, a technology slightly ahead of the terrestrial networks that can be bought today? I think that it may be. Any mobile network operator deploying Femtocell needs to get its customer service and support operation dead right or the ill-will generated will be significant.

[Ben]

I think femtocell's are only going to have consumer appeal if they come bundled with cheap or unlimited at-home usage. Otherwise I don't think the end user is really going to see the benefit.

Businesses, on the other hand, would do much better to deploy femtocell's. If the networks make them affordable or include them as part of business contracts then they could really improve using mobiles in office buildings.

The main problem is that the networks don't really seem to know what to do with the technology yet. I'm not hopeful :(

[getti]

Should be a very interesting year for femtocells in the UK and thats all i can say :D

[3g-g]

I've seen and used the Orange femtocell solution in their test bed a few times, it's a fantastic idea, the only issue (which I imagine is the same for all the operators) is dealing with the phone calls on it, getting them back into the cellular network and the capacity associated with it aggregating the ADSL/IP traffic onto their HLRs/VLRs/BSCs/Gateways for authentication (which could be millions of calls) and then the change into PCM traffic out onto old telephony network. The last I'd heard was that it was going to need a dedicated equipment to deal with that side of things, which kind of defeats the purpose of an ad-hoc in building solution you can just chuck out anywhere.

If the ADSL side of things was easy to roll out, and able to carry voice and data traffic without worry of packet delay/line resets we'd have all those cellular masts on 24 meg ADSL lines and our 3G data speeds would be amazing! :p

[bsrjl1]

In the next software release Nokia RNC & WBTS can support Iub over SDSL, and the HSPA layer over ADSL. I'm sure other vendors will be looking to implement something similar.

[3g-g]

Well there you go! :)