Jason’s Random Thoughts

We do some pretty crazy things for the sake of a single bar of reception on our cell phones.  In the 10 years since getting my first mobile phone, I’ve succumbed to standing in the corner of a room, climbing to the top of a stairwell, going outside in the cold and even holding on to something metal.

But soon the days of despair that occur when you arrive home only to find your new handset does not get any coverage in your house may be over.  Femtocells are starting to be issued on a trial basis, and if the hype is to be believed, it could end signal problems forever.

Femtocells are about the size of a paperback book that plug in to our home network and, by extension, our internet connection.  When we make a call near a femtocell, instead of routing the call through the carrier’s towers, we would instead be using the femtocell and having our conversation over the internet.

Until recently these devices have been the preserve of big business.  However, they may come bundled with our mobile phone contracts in the near future.

ip.access, a femtocell producer based in the UK, has just launched a 3G femtocell targeted diretly at home users which would also bring high-speed mobile broadband into the home.  It is one of several offerings from companies like Airwalk or Ubiquisys, which recently gained some media attention when Google invested in the firms.  Not to be outdone, the world’s largest network operator, Vodafone, has also announced they will trial the technology.

In my search for greater information, I tried to find out whether we could be using a carrier’s tower while on the way home, then seamlessly switch to the femtocell once we were within range, or if your cell phone could use the femtocells at a friend’s home.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything saying whether this was possible or not.

But that said, the technology goes beyond simply mopping up the people who cannot make calls on their network.  In a very real sense, this will be taking on mobile WiFi.

Femtocells use 3G technology, which has download speeds upwards of 7 Mbits/sec.  This is just a bit better than most Canadians have in their home.  Grabbing an increasing share of the market would be atractive to mobile carriers as this could lead to the integration of 3G technologies right into notebooks.  This would then give mobile operators the ability to take a bite back out of the WiFi market, which has been eating away at mobile for years.

Wireless connectivity on handsets along with VoIP has allowed people to cut the cost of calls by bypassing the mobile phone network altogether.  Companies such as Skype and Vonage have gotten in on this and made their mark on the world.  If mobile carriers can get femtocells into the home quickly, they could potentially prevent the rise of VoIP over home WiFi.

Of course, because these femtocells use 3G technology, there is not much chance of this appearing in North American markets anytime soon.  But with the UK and Asia being almost all 3G, there is a good chance I might be able to review this technology while in Japan.  I am curious to know what kind of offerings the cell phone carriers would offer customers who use femtocells, though.  If we’re using our own internet connection, would we really accept the same usage fee?

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