NEWS: Google sees big money in tiny cell sites (femtocells)

Search giant Google has joined investors pouring $25m into femtocell technology company Ubiquisys, endorsing the technology that aims to put tiny little 3G cell sites into every home.

Last week, Vodafone's request for proposal (basically asking for a quote) for femtocell hardware became public, a significant indication that it's serious about deploying the technology in at least some of its operating territories.

This follows the recent announcement that Netgear would be incorporating femtocell technology into some of its ADSL routers.

Femtocells are more useful than just delivering cellular coverage. They have the potential to replace Wi-Fi in most homes, as well as delivering data content without using cellular infrastructure - if network operators can understand and exploit their potential.

[MORE]

See also

Reply to
John Navas
Loading thread data ...

John Navas wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Sorry- it's not fact until it comes from a reputable source. I see no citations from NYT, WP, WSJ, etc.

Reply to
Scott

John Navas hath wroth:

At this time, femtocells require an FCC license. The governmint wants to treat them a extension of the cellular provider and are therefore required to provide interception (wire tap) services. The providers seem to think that the femtocell will also provide access for their other customers as they pass by. That's fine, but since the backhaul will be via the internet, the home owners broadband might become seriously constipated if overused. There are also topology problems as the current cellular architecture is not going to scale to huge numbers of home femtocells. Lastly, I'm not sure the average home owner is going to give up their free cordless phone in favor of a billable cell phone equivalent. Incidentally, the old AT&T tried this with LMDS and an ISDN backhaul on the pole many years ago, and gave up. The issue was not lack of speed. It was customers balking at paying for in the home phone calls.

Also see Airwalk, IP Access, and RadioFrame.

So, what comes after femto? Well, there's atto, zepto, and yocto (in that order). I guess the AttoCell will be a wearable cell site and ZeptoCell will be where the cell site is implanted in your head.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I see no reply from navas yet to Verizon turning down the iphone deal that was reported by the register. :)

I wonder why that is ?

Reply to
Kevin Weaver

No need for nasty talk. no.

Reply to
Madhav "DogFocker" Acharya

What ever happened to the Freedom Link phone that Bell (or at least Southwestern Bell) offered that was a cordless phone in your house, but a cellular handset out of range of your house.

Reply to
DTC

DTC hath wroth:

I have no idea. As I recall, that was about 10 years ago. Googling:

Yep. 1996. $800 to $1800 per user (with no per minute charges) seems a bit pricy, even for 10 years ago.

The Freedomlink trademark (service mark?) has mutated into at&t Wi-Fi hotspot service:

In my never humble opinion, the original LMDS plan made considerable sense. LMDS access points was to be installed on the phone poles using coax or fiber backhauls. The various cable and telco vendors would share the connection, backhaul, and termination, selling integrated services to the customer. The problem was that when it was first proposed, all Ma Bell could think of offering was ISDN at

128Kbits/sec. There were also some large aerospace companies involved in the system design, but I forgot which one. I'm not sure why it died, but herding cats comes to mind.
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

No one bought them and they got dumped on the closeout market for pennies on the dollar without the base stations.

Way back in the late 90s when I was a SBMS (eventually Cingular) dealer I used to buy them cheap and resell them as prepaid phones. The older folks loved them- they looked and acted like cordless phones- they even generated a fake dial tone (you pushed "talk" then dialed, rather than the other way around like a typical cell. This will probably be hard for the kids to understand, but that once was the biggest "support" issue I had as a wireless dealer- teaching people how to dial them!

Reply to
Todd Allcock

Last time I tried looking for it was ummm...golly 2001 or so.

I installed half a dozen of them in businesses back around '94 through '96. I don't recall the base price, but I seem to recall the cellular pricing was twice that of a regular account. Back in the days when daytime minute plans were like 200 to 400 minutes a month.

Reply to
DTC

How things have changed. The number where I worked at one time all started with 630 as the exchange. This is also an area code. So every once in a while we would get calls for people that weren't there. After the first couple we always asked for the number they were calling. It was invariably a person calling from a regular phone to the 630 area code and forgetting that they needed to dial 1 first. Cell habits die hard.

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:48:29 GMT, "Kevin Weaver" wrote in :

  1. Too busy to waste time here.
  2. Same old same old USA Today op-ed piece.
Reply to
John Navas

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:29:00 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

Citation?

Not according to what I've seen.

Many of us are already cutting the cord to our not-free landlines in favor of cellular wireless.

Reply to
John Navas

IF your so busy, then why are you back for hours trying to reply ?

Reply to
Kevin Weaver

John Navas hath wroth:

"The radio is a standard based radio such as UMTS/HSPA which the operator will likely require a license to operate on."

I'll admit that it's speculation on my part. It's possible that you're correct and that the FCC has suddenly released its iron grip on anything belching RF and simply allowed rampant proliferation of consumer installed cell sites, but I doubt it. However, I haven't been following the news, so it's possible.

Meanwhile, as I understand it, a cellular operator can deploy as many cell sites within their designated coverage area as required to provide adequate service without going to the FCC for additional licensing. They don't even need to tell the FCC where the sites are located. In short, the carriers have a single license for a specific coverage area. That's for the carrier, not for the consumer. I just don't see femto cells being sold retail in an uncontrolled manner or without some kind of regulatory involvement.

One of the proponents (LM Erikson???) had suggested that femto cells be sold to businesses to offer improved coverage in their stores and offices. I sorta assumed that this also applied to well positioned home owners, such as those adjacent to shopping areas. Sorry, but I can't find the reference.

However, you're generally coorect. For example, Ubiquisys has their "ZoneGate" technology, which limits access to the femto cell base station to registered SIM cards.

"Can anyone within range of a ZoneGate access point make mobile calls? SIM setup and identity mean that only users with the bill payer's permission can make calls using the ZoneGate device. In addition, because each device has a unique network identity, operators can offer customers special low-cost 'home zone' rates."

I don't have a wired telephone in the my palatial office and use the cell phone exclusively. It works well enough to tolerate the calls that go directly to voice mail and the random disconnects (Verizon). Fortunately, most of my phone use is during non-prime time, where such problems are infrequent.

However, that's not exactly what I was talking about. I'm referring to the difference between a $35 cordless phone purchase, with no per-minute charges, attached to a $20/month POTS phone, versus a $15/month (2nd phone including handset subsidy and taxes) cellular account for a handset with per-minute charges and/or monthly quotas. I can see some additional utility to have one instrument do everything, but without a corresponding cost benefit, I doubt if the average consumer would consider it worth the effort. If it were, then we would see a larger number of cellular "docking stations" attached to cordless or DECT phones in homes and businesses to allow sharing a cellular account. These products exist, but are not particularly popular. Unless the hardware were free or subsidized, doing essentially the same thing with a femto cell only makes sense if the home or business owner abandons all POTS service and switches exclusively to cellular. I don't see that happening.

The push also seems to be toward delivering 3G data to the home. That's nice because the same operators don't like "tethered access" or using the cell phone as a data modem. So, fixed data service is acceptable with a femto cell, but not an individual handset? Weird.

Basically, femto cell is a method of reducing the cost of deploying additional cell sites to provide adequate 3G data coverage. Building cell sites is expensive. Chopping the cell site into tiny pieces and passing it around the neighborhood, is cheaper. Otherwise, they're the same.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

I sm not to sure about that. When I worked for nextel and latter voicestream everysite we had had to have a copy of the license in it, and we also had to report to the fcc the lat and log of every site to the fcc. Yes it was one license, but it listed all our cell sites, and when we added cell sites we had to report them to the FCC.

Yet alone the interference they may introduce into the microcells that are already licensed and operated. The carrier will have todo some frequency planning for these cells. Of course they are not radiating much power, but close in they may introduce interference, especially between close neighbors, if some kind of frequency planning is not being done. Documents I have seen indicate that femtocells will have frequency planning as part of the design.

Yep, good point. The femto cells will bea underlay to existing cell coverage hopefully allowing seamless handovers.

Reply to
Dana

"Dana" hath wroth:

Nextel is different. Nextel is not cellular. It's SMR (specialized mobile radio) and is individually licenced by the site. When refarming started, I vaguely recall someone from Nextel mumbling something about having to tweak 30,000 licenses, and that was just for the left coast.

If a carrier introduces interference to its own system, who's at fault? For that matter, who is going to fix it?

Fat chance. Both the customers and the femto cells are going to be fairly portable. I would assume that the femto cell has a GPS built in (for timing sync if nothing else), which should give the carrier a clue as to its location of the moment.

The power is low, but then so is the signal from the 3G cell site. The assumption is that one only needs a femto cell (repeater) if the 3G signal is too low to be useable in the house. So, it's a fair assumption that the neighbors will have equally lousy reception from the 3G cell site. Since the femto cell will probably belch more signal to the neighbors than they can receive from the cell site, there's a good chance that their marginal 3G coverage may start to approach zero.

Planning is good. Engineering is better.

Maybe, but only if each femto cell allows roaming from the neighbors and passerbys. The Ubiquisys box can only handle 4 connections max which could easily be insufficient to handle both the household and roaming traffic. At this point, it's all speculation, including most of what I've been guessing. I really don't know what the various proponents of femto cells are thinking or plotting. However, I'm sure the grandois schemes and engineering miracles will follow shortly.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Yes I see that, but voicestream is a pcs carrier, and up here in rural Alaska everyone of our cell sites is listed on our license with their lat and longs.

Which is why I was saying this, the carriers are not going to place femtocells out there without some kind of frequency planning

A block of frequecies may be set aside for these femto cells, where the carriers will work around them.

Reply to
Dana

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:00:15 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

MetroPCS offers unlimited cellular calling starting at only $30/month. My AT&T plan is $40/month for 1000 anytime minutes, which is much more than I typically need -- I now have several thousand minutes in Rollover. :)

I think it's more a matter of displacing landlines by making cell phones work better indoors, which is much easier (albeit more costly) with femtocells than with conventional cells.

Reply to
John Navas

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:57:50 -0700, "Kevin Weaver" wrote in :

Minutes, not hours.

Reply to
John Navas

Looking at your times your posting, I see you spent about one hour today. Another lie. Which you always like to do.

Why did we never see any reply from you about the iphone being offered to verizon first ? Which was shown from the site you like to copy and paste from ? (The Register)

If It's min's then your sure on here many of them.

Reply to
Kevin Weaver

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.