With the mobile web now having reached ‘critical mass’ – according to a report by Neilsen Mobile – the 3G infrastructure is beginning to groan under the weight of all that music downloading and web perusal and mobile operators are having to think about the future.
At the Bristol Wireles 2.0 conference, much was made of Femtocells as a possible way forward. Femtocells are small base stations that allow a standard broadband connection to become a short-range 3G cell.
Thee can be used to extend a 3G network to areas with poor reception or could be used to provide extra bandwidth for areas with larger populations.
Several of the suppliers at the even suggested that next year would see several commercial products being released, and that Vodafone in particular is interested in rolling out femtocell base stations in the street.
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Poor reception seems to be more of a problem in North America than Europe. Sprint has already commercially launched a femtocell product in the US, branded as Airave, with Verizon and others saying they will follow suit soon. These are targetted specifically for poor indoor voice coverage problems, common in the US.
In Europe, the issue is more likely to be about 3G data. The higher frequency of 3G and the growing demand for high data rates and low latencies, means that outdoor cellsite capacity will be quickly used up. Femtocells allow traffic be offloaded to local, low-power indoor receivers, freeing up capacity for those truly on the move. The business case for operators looks good, but there is still work to be done to convince households to install their own femtocells, which would augment WiFi.
All the major operators are trialling these systems, with Telefonica O2 being most public about it – they seem to have the best wireline broadband service but are a bit behind on wireless broadband. Orange have implemented an alternative approach using WiFi (called UMA), but are not actively marketing this in the UK. T-Mobile have actively invested in both a femtocell chip vendor and an equipment manufacturer through their international venture capital division.
David Chambers
ThinkFemtocell.com