New Small Thing In Mobile Technology: Femtocells

By Digitivity on April 1, 2008 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recently conducted survey, it was revealed that most people switch their cellular phone providers not because of high priced call plans or poor customer services but because of poor network coverage inside their homes where 27% to 47% of all wireless minutes are spent.

New technologies like Wi-Fi to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) have been introduced to tackle poor network coverage inside homes. The most effective technology for improvement of cell coverage is “FEMTOCELL”. The word “femto” denotes something one-quadrillionth the size of a given unit, and is derived from Danish or Norwegian word “femten”.

Femtocells are small cellular phone base stations designed to be located inside offices or homes. They act as in-home wireless access points and use high speed internet connection rather than wireless network to route a call from a headset to the carrier’s switching station from where it is directed to its destination.

In simple language, Femtocell is a handy device, which looks like a router or modem capable of sidestepping nearby towers and the weak coverage they sometimes provide. They use a DSL/Cable connection to backhaul traffic or in simple words they connect cellular networks through broadband lines such as digital subscriber line (DSL) or fiber to the home (FTTH).

Therefore, the purpose of FEMTOCELL is to provide mobile phone users a good and effective network in areas away from existing base stations. Carriers are busy looking for new methods to find a solution to the ever increasing demands of the users for greater and extended coverages.

In comparison to better-established technologies like Wi-Fi and WiMax which deliver high speed internet access. Ray Smets, Vice-President marketing in the broadband solution group at Motorola said that femtocells were getting an equal amount of energy in terms of importance and they were being considered just as significant as other wireless technologies that were being developed.

Search giant Google, invested $20 million on Britain based femtocell startup Ubiquisys. Thomson, world’s largest producer of DSL modems, collaborated with infrastructure maker Nokia Siemens Networks to develop femtocell gear. Netgear which makes Wi- Fi routers, co-founded Femto Forum primarily to promote femtocell standards and applications.

World leaders in technology, Motorola and world web search leader Google are the first companies to sincerely work on the improvement of mobile coverage inside houses/buildings. They are investing tremendous resources for speedy development of femtocells. Recently, Motorola bought Startup Netopia to add to its femtocell efforts.

The main question is why there is a sudden flurry of interest on wireless technology like femtocell? According to a consultancy ABI Research, by 2012, there will be more than 150 million users of femtocell products on 70 million access points worldwide. That’s a huge advancement of a technology which is in trails now. Femtocell technology can give newcomers such as Google, a big launch in the wireless market while offering competition to existing telecom providers such as AT&T and Vonage.