Do you need a femto?
Vodafone UK has announced that from this month, you can buy your very own femtocell and sit it in the corner of your living room. But how many people need a femtocell, or even know what one is?
For mobile phone companies around the world, rolling out base stations to increase their coverage is an expensive process, but even more expensive is "backhaul" which is the routing of call traffic back to their switching centres. The answer to both these problems could be the femtocell.
The femtocell was invented about two years ago and following field testing, is ready for user deployment. It is a low power mobile base station, a self contained box about the size of a paperback with just two leads, one to plug into a power socket, and the other to plug into your ADSL socket so that it can relay calls back to the mobile operator using your internet connection. With one of these in your home, you can be sure of always getting a mobile phone signal, even if you live out in middle of nowhere. It will also let you make full use of the facilities and data services built into high-end 3G phones such as web surfing, and these services will run at the full speed of your ADSL line.
The big gain to the mobile operator is that your ADSL line is used to handle your call traffic, greatly reducing their costs and you do this at your own expense. The femto is priced at around £150, which isn't cheap, and you still have to pay the full price of your calls, even though they are using your broadband.
So you pay for the hardware, you pay for the ADSL line, and you still don't get cheaper calls or any of the call revenue. So why would you want one? If you are a household of several 3G phone users, you may find that currently there are limited places in your house where you can get a signal. A femtocell would extend coverage throughout your house. If you are a business with staff who use 3G phones then you may find it good for staff relations to put a femto in the corner of the office. Some laptops such as the Acer Travelmate come fitted with 3G-based networking and also make a femtocell an attractive proposition, but do check your tariff before using it to replace your WiFi connection and make sure you are not paying your mobile operator to use your own ADSL line.
22nd July 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.