What are Femtocells, and their potential effect on wireless mobile networks?
“Femto” is the metric prefix denoting one quadrillionth (million billionth) of a unit. Femtocells are not that tiny, but they are very small, low-power versions of the radio towers and their wardrobe-sized base-stations used in mobile-phone networks. Hooked up to a home's broadband-internet connection, femtocells provide solid indoor coverage and allow residents to make cheap calls using their existing handsets. Leave the house while chatting, and the call is automatically handed over to the wider mobile-phone network.
Network operators could also benefit. Femtocells could reduce the load on their infrastructure, saving them from building more radio towers as they add more subscribers and introduce high-speed multimedia services. The technology also gives them a foothold in the home, where most telecoms services are consumed, and could even promote customer loyalty.
Before their implementation, the industry has a few problems to solve first. One is their ease of use: subscribers will be expected to set them up themselves. Another is interference: too many femtocells in close proximity could interfere with each other, or with existing mobile networks. The biggest hurdle is financial; today the femtocell hardware costs around $200—twice what operators deem acceptable.
Femtocells may even change the way networks are designed. At the moment they are treated as add-ons to existing networks, however in new networks femtocells are likely to play a more central role, to the detriment of big, costly radio towers. This would be a thorny issue for the big telecoms-equipment firms, such as Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent, which sell the gear used in today's networks.
Go back to Next_generation_mobile_devices_2015