Your average femtocell isn’t good for coverage on spaces larger than a big home or smaller office. The AT&T 3G microcell is a good example, it is good for 5,000 square feet of coverage. A company called Roke from England has unveiled a new femtocell called the Wide Area Coverage Femtocell that crushes that 5,000 square foot service area.
Roke claims that its femtocell is good for 40,000 times more coverage than your average femtocell. The femtocell also promises to offer coverage at speeds up to 120kph allowing the user to travel while staying connected.
The femtocell is a LTE device and supports up to 12 users at the same time. With a huge coverage area of 40km, I would have though more users could be on at the same time. The company says that the femtocell is low cost but doesn’t offer specific pricing information.
Sprint got FCC approval for an EV-DO-capable version of its Airave femtocell back in April — and now, it’s Verizon’s turn. As you might expect, this is the same Samsung-sourced unit that we saw back in January at CES, which was expected to launch in the second quarter. It’s a little late for that, but not by much — and FCC approval is typically a good sign for these sorts of things. Besides the addition of 3G data, the new model should support up to eight simultaneous connections (versus the current model’s four). Enough to justify an upgrade for current owners? Probably not, but a nice refresh for anyone on the fence about whether they really need an extra bar or three of signal strength at the home or office.
Femtocells: simple home cellular base stations that let you make a call when you’re indoors and you can’t persuade Verizon, AT&T or any of the other carriers to boost their coverage, right? Not if Airvana have their way; the company – who already supply carriers like Sprint with their Airave femto, and who are tipped to be readying a VoIP-capable model for the network – are hoping to turn personal base stations into connected home multimedia hubs, intelligently managing a family’s communications and potentially shepherding in more touchscreen tablets. We caught up with the company to find out why smart femtos are the way forward.
A little background first: a femtocell is basically a domestic or small-office scale cellular base station, that hooks up to your broadband connection and creates a localized area of 2G or 3G coverage (depending on model). Your cellphone automatically pairs with the femto as if it were a regular base station – usually with some sort of pre-registration so as to prevent unauthorized access – and then any calls you make are passed over broadband to the carrier’s network backbone rather than over the crowded airwaves.
Femtocells make sense for carriers as they allow them to shift heavy users off of wireless and onto the more capacious hard-wired network, and they make sense to users because they guarantee coverage in an area that perhaps doesn’t normally see sufficient bars to make calls or use data services. Of course there’s also a cost question on top of that – some operators charge upfront for the femto and then the ongoing service is free, while others subsidize the femto and then have a service fee and/or count calls against your wireless minutes – though that’s up to the carrier rather than Airvana.
What makes the Airvana Femto Family Tablet – aka the Femt’Au Pair – special is its seamless integration with multiple devices, and the way it uses that integration. Airvana showed a demo where a cameraphone, when it came into range of the home femtocell, automatically transferred all its new photos to the home computer (in this case a touchscreen Sony VAIO all-in-one running a web-based “home hub” demo UI) and uploaded them to a Facebook gallery. The process was near-instantaneous, and at the same time the handset – a Motorola DROID – automatically changed its wallpaper to a “home” image and flashed up a message saying “Welcome Home”. Since it took place over a cellular link (and at very fast speeds, since femtos are far more likely to reach the higher limits of HSDPA/HSUPA than a public base station) it didn’t require WiFi be turned on or paired first.
Meanwhile, messages left – either locally or sent through an automatically created VPN link when a handset is remote – from other home users flashed up on the VAIO’s screen and on the mobile version of the app viewable on the DROID. In Airvana’s demo, the DROID was set as a teenager’s handset while a Nexus One was set as the parent’s phone: as soon as the DROID came into femtocell range, an SMS was sent to the Nexus One saying the teenager was home. Meanwhile the parent could send messages – such as “do your piano practice” or “I’ll be late” – to the teenager, flashing up on the VAIO and on the handset. A “Family Location” pane automatically updated to show where each person was, tracked by their phone and the base station they were connected to.
The clever part is that Airvana don’t require complex modification of the mobile handset in order to use the basic functionality. The femtocell is capable of automatically collecting photos – you can also view them remotely, browsing the phone’s memory as if it were locally attached via USB – together with pulling out calendar data without any specific software running. The calendar is intelligent enough to tell the difference between a physical location and a scheduled location, so for instance if the teenager leaves school and goes to the mall instead, that can be flagged up. Meanwhile, more complex femtocell-specific APIs have been developed that Airvana are pushing to have included into mobile handset OSes, that would allow for more significant interaction between the phone and the Family Tablet, for instance the changing wallpaper.
Those APIs – which Airvana will make publicly available, so carriers and developers alike can build applications or FAPapps (“Femtocell Access Point apps”) for the system – are what makes the Femto Family Tablet really interesting. The company told us that the carriers they’ve spoken to have been keen on interoperability between different brands of femto and different carrier models, which hopefully means that a Verizon femto app won’t be confused if wirelessly paired with a Sprint femto, for instance. It also leaves plenty of room for third-party developer involvement: Airvana haven’t added image push functionality from the Family Tablet to the phone, for instance, but the service backbone is there and it would merely someone producing software for it.
Airvana envisage different versions of the system, and are in talks with various carriers who are leaning toward one or the other. The femto intelligence could be in a server integrated into the base station itself, serving up a local webpage for interaction in a similar way to the setup pages of most routers. Alternatively, a standalone box could be used – similar, perhaps, to Verizon’s ill-fated Home Hub, only with a femtocell built in – that had a touchscreen for control. Finally, some carriers are talking about a remote, cloud-based interface that would see minimal intelligence in the local femtocell. As for what handsets the more complex features would be compatible with, Airvana already have an Android API and are working on versions for iOS, BlackBerry OS and other platforms at the moment. One interesting addition is virtual DLNA support, which basically allows non-DLNA compliant mobile phones to connect to – and send/receive content to/from – a DLNA source such as a media server or HDTV using the femto as a bridge.
The company won’t be offering Femto Family Tablet hardware themselves; instead they’re working with carriers with the femtocells and the underlying hub system. It’ll be up to those network operators to decide what sort of box might appear in your living room, whether that will have its own touchscreen interface, use your PC or iPad, or even your HDTV. As for timescales, their estimate is sometime next year for Europe or North America; similar systems are already operating, though a little less complex, in Japan, where Airvana are working with KDDI among others. Carriers are likely to be spurred on by the research Airvana commissioned that found users would consider paying significantly higher monthly service fees and upfront hardware costs for systems that included home-hub style functionality; that, and the fact that the company just won awards for both the Femto Family Tablet and their contribution to femto standards. In fact the only people we can see not being too keen are teenagers: having your parents automatically updated whenever you arrive home or leave the house, or if you bunk off school, may prove to be a hard sell that even tight Facebook integration can’t quite sweeten.
Completing a phased roll-out that kicked off back in April, AT&T has finally gotten around to launching its 3G MicroCell in all of its markets, giving the entire customer base some flexibility when “more bars in more places” doesn’t happen to include your place. Interestingly, the announcement was made in passing during comments by AT&T director Gordon Mansfield at the Femtocells World Summit in London this week, where he spent much of his time trying to quell a minor furor over the carrier’s continued application of data caps when using the MicroCell. He makes some pretty strong arguments: even though all MicroCell voice and data traffic starts off traveling over your own internet connection, it ultimately ends up within AT&T’s core infrastructure — and a legal requirement that the carrier be able to intercept traffic for law enforcement use prevents it from diverting that traffic elsewhere. More importantly, though, if you’re within range of a MicroCell, odds are very good that you’re also within range of a WiFi connection — and since all of AT&T’s data-heavy handsets offer WiFi, the whole complaint is kinda moot. So just get one if you need one and don’t worry about it, okay?
I like the idea of a femtocell, but I don’t like the way that mobile carriers have positioned the devices. AT&T is a perfect example. The coverage for my iPhone in my local area is not good. Calls drop, the phone simply won’t ring sometimes, and generally the data speeds are slow. AT&T will sell me a femtocell to shore up the shoddy network by using my WiFi connection at home. I just don’t think I should have to pay again to fix a shoddy network I am already paying to use.
If you feel differently about femtocells, you might be interested in the femtocell TI is showing off at the Femtocells World Summit in London. The femtocell can support up to 32 users at once. That is way more than most femotcells that typically support about ten users.
This would be the perfect femtocell for an office that wants to connect a bunch of workers to a more reliable connection. The demonstration of the new femtocell is meant to highlight tech from TI and partners Azcom and Nash.
AT&T’s 3G Microcell is prompting controversy, after it emerged that the carrier will be counting data use through the femtocell towards users’ monthly wireless data allowance, despite being routed via your own broadband connection. Therefore, if you use significant amounts of data when your phone is connected through the femtocell, you could find yourself falling foul of AT&T’s recent data caps without even using their regular wireless network.
AT&T, for their part, claim that there is a cost incurred for them to handle the data once it goes beyond a user’s home broadband connection, though that seems a little disingenuous since it’s then on their fiber backbone rather than being herded through the crowded wireless spectrum. Of course, if you’re near your AT&T 3G Microcell then you’re probably also within range of a WiFi hotspot, so could always hop on that instead, but with the femtocell priced at $150 and being seen, in part, as a way for AT&T to use your own connection rather than bulk out their network, we can imagine there’ll be plenty of people frustrated by this.
I’ve personally been following the launch of AT&T’s 3G MicroCell very, very closely; I moved last year into a box surrounded on three sides by foot-thick cement (not much of an exaggeration) in which only Verizon’s and T-Mobile’s signals were able to penetrate without assistance — and in my position, it’s a non-negotiable requirement that I be able to use devices from all four US nationals. Since the announcement a few weeks back that the MicroCell would be going national, I’ve been practically bombarding my Chicago-area stores with calls, looking for a hint of detail on when they might be available here; they’ve already launched in New York City, so AT&T clearly isn’t concerned about using them in densely-packed urban areas. This weekend I called four stores, and here’s what I got:
Store 1: “We’re supposed to have them in a couple of weeks.” Store 2: “We’ll have them on May 6.” Store 3: “We have them in stock. Oh, hold on a minute. (long pause) I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to sell them until the 10th.” Store 4: “Yes, we have them in stock.”
In other words, there was no shortage of variety in sales reps’ stories. I don’t know how this happens — it’s conceivable that AT&T really is telling each store something entirely different, but it seems far more likely that these guys simply haven’t been effectively educated on what’s going on here. At any rate, I was able to march down to the fourth store I called and pick up the MicroCell with no hassles, therefore ending a many month-long personal nightmare of mine (and by the way, the device works just wonderfully).
The lesson learned? Even if the MicroCell hasn’t launched in your market — that is, you go to AT&T’s MicroCell site and it tells you it’s not yet available in your zip code — be persistent and keep calling around. You’ve just got to find that one sales guy who’s willing to flip it.
Wireless customers around the globe with femtocells securely stowed in their homes might start to take five bars of signal strength for granted, but there are still plenty of gotchas; your internet service could go down, for example, taking your phone with it — and it turns out that your carrier can inadvertently bring it to its knees on occasion, too. It looks like a whole lot of Vodafone’s Sure Signal-branded units in the UK have been acting up the past couple days due to network registration issues; new and existing Sure Signal customers alike have been affected, turning homes back into the barren, 3G-less wastelands they were before the device existed. Most (if not all) of the Sure Signals are now back in action, but considering that the outage lasted a lot longer than a few brief moments, let’s hope that the Voda techs behind the scenes learned a lesson or two in the process.
Sprint’s femtocell plans have been tipped by the FCC, with the company’s latest model sneaking through ahead of its official debut. The new Sprint Airave differs from its predecessor by adding in EVDO support for higher speed data connectivity, together with throwing in a VoIP phone port, based on a femtocell design by Airvana.
Details of the VoIP functionality aren’t entirely clear from the draft user manual on the FCC site, but we’re assuming you’ll be able to plug in a regular landline phone and bridge calls over your broadband network, probably with some low-cost calling plan from Sprint. Alternatively, they could offer wired use of your mobile minutes; we’ll have to wait until the official announcement to know for sure.
Unfortunately there’s still a GPS chip in place, so you won’t be able to take the new Sprint Airave out of the country and expect it to work. Sprint look to have missed their target of getting a 3G-capable femtocell on sale before AT&T managed it, but the Airave does have VoIP functionality which is something the AT&T 3G Microcell lacks.
The Samsung-sourced femtocell that Sprint and Verizon have been offering (as the Airave and Wireless Network Extender, respectively) is all well and good, but it’s got one fatal flaw: unlike AT&T’s aptly-named 3G MicroCell, it doesn’t have support for 3G data — it’s compatible with CDMA 1x alone. Verizon’s fixing that later this year with an updated model from Samsung, but thanks to a fresh FCC filing, it looks like Sprint will be taking a different route by roping in Airvana for the Airave’s successor. On top of EV-DO, the interesting bit about this puppy is that it supports a VoIP-routed landline connection around back; we’re not sure whether Sprint actually plans on enabling this extra jack, but it’s specifically mentioned in the draft manual, so we wouldn’t doubt it. No word on a release just yet — but FCC approval is frequently one of the last steps on a product’s road to retail, so we might see it soon.
Your average femtocell isn’t good for coverage on spaces larger than a big home or smaller office. The AT&T 3G microcell is a good example, it is good for 5,000 square feet of coverage. A company called Roke from England has unveiled a new femtocell called the Wide Area Coverage Femtocell that crushes that 5,000 square foot service area.
Meanwhile, messages left – either locally or sent through an automatically created VPN link when a handset is remote – from other home users flashed up on the VAIO’s screen and on the mobile version of the app viewable on the DROID. In Airvana’s demo, the DROID was set as a teenager’s handset while a Nexus One was set as the parent’s phone: as soon as the DROID came into femtocell range, an SMS was sent to the Nexus One saying the teenager was home. Meanwhile the parent could send messages – such as “do your piano practice” or “I’ll be late” – to the teenager, flashing up on the VAIO and on the handset. A “Family Location” pane automatically updated to show where each person was, tracked by their phone and the base station they were connected to.
I like the idea of a femtocell, but I don’t like the way that mobile carriers have positioned the devices. AT&T is a perfect example. The coverage for my iPhone in my local area is not good. Calls drop, the phone simply won’t ring sometimes, and generally the data speeds are slow. AT&T will sell me a femtocell to shore up the shoddy network by using my WiFi connection at home. I just don’t think I should have to pay again to fix a shoddy network I am already paying to use.
