[opendtv] Will Femtocells Save LTE?
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:45:32 -0500
And by the way, there is no reason to believe that femtocells are only
applicable to indoors.
This is exactly why I have never bought into the Genachowski FCC alarmism about
spectrum, and their single-minded resolve to grab everyone else's spectrum for
mobile wireless. That approach simply has no future. It doesn't scale. This
approach, instead, leverages off the cabled infrastructure to make a real
difference, just as cellular made initially, compared with longer range two-way
radio telephony.
Parenthetically, femtocells don't need LTE to work. More unnecessary LTE hype.
Bert
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http://www.lte.tmworld.com/blog/will-femtocells-save-lte
Will Femtocells Save LTE?
By Richard Quinnell April 12, 2011
A femtocell is a kind of mini cellular network that works is a small region
around your home of office. It handles your cellphone call while you are in its
coverage area, but links to the wider Internet and telephony networks through a
wired connection such as DSL. These nifty little personal cellular networks may
prove to be a savior of sorts for LTE by helping avoid network overload and
rising consumer costs as wireless data traffic continues its exponential climb.
Users of femtocells see no differences from using the wireless network. Dialing
out is the same. Receiving calls is the same. The cellphone will even
automatically hand off an on-going call to the femtocell and vice versa as the
user passes over the cell boundary. All the registered user equipment within
the femtocell can both freely access the Internet and exchange data among
themselves without having to reach out through the wider network, as well.
Sounds sort of like WiFi, doesn't it?
The difference is: a femtocell uses cellular equipment frequencies and
protocols rather than 802.11. In fact, a femtocell router is essentially a
miniature cellular base station, only operating in the milliwatt output power
range.
Because it uses a wired connection to the outside world, a femtocell offers
benefits to both the consumer and the service provider. For the consumer, the
femtocell permits in-home use of a cellphone without consuming wireless service
minutes or data allocations. The actual connection to the outside world is
through the wired network, so wireless billing schemes don't apply.
For the provider, femtocells solve two very nagging problems. One is
degradation in cellular signal quality as the signal passes through building
walls, which can cause decreased bandwidth availability and increases in lost
calls. With a femtocell handling interior communications, service providers to
not have to invest in more towers to keep users happy.
The other nagging problem is the burden that skyrocketing wireless data traffic
is placing on network capacity. A significant fraction of that traffic occurs
while the user is at home, and a femtocell would remove that traffic from the
greater wireless network and shift it to the wired network. This reduction in
wireless traffic may be enough to slow the rate at which service providers must
grow capacity to something more manageable than current projections suggest.
This last bit is most important. Growth in wireless data traffic threatens to
overwhelm service providers, and could cause LTE to become either underpowered
or overpriced. Either way, it's bad for the industry. Femtocells are already in
service for older wireless technologies like CDMA. Now we need to make them
increasingly available for LTE.
Readers interested in the business case for femtocells or wanting to find out
more about them should check out these websites: www.thinkfemtocell.com and the
UK's Femto Forum.
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