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Beware fried kid's brains as mobile operators target the home
The International Conference on Home Access Points and Femtocells was remarkable, perhaps unique, yesterday in highlighting the problems of the technology it was discussing as much or even more than the advantages.
The advantages to operators, outlined in our story today, are clear; the advantages to subscribers are less so. They will enjoy better-quality in-house calls but operators are hoping they will also download music and movies. And no-one at the conference, to my mind, gave a compelling case why people would pay mobile operators to do this when they can do it faster for free using Wifi or one of the emerging short-range technologies. (There's a lot on those in the next edition of PCW magazine and we'll post it online soon).
Essentially, the mobile operators will be hiring out clean spectrum for home use, which will become important if Wifi links become intolerably congested. But even in this femtocells are not unique: in Europe DECT and its faster stablemate Cat-iq use uncluttered 1.9GHz frequencies and they are beginning to be used for web calls.
This is not to say the femtocell idea should be written off. It manages power consumption much more elegantly and efficently than Wifi, according to Will Franks, founder and chief technology officer of UK start-up Ubiquisys, which makes Femtocell systems.
The femtocell base station negotiates with each handset within range to decide the minimum power it needs to communicate with them. "It sets the levels so that the signal strength is the same for each handset, whatever its range, so that one does not take precedence."
Franks claimed: "I can barely reach across my house using a 100milliwatt Wifi signal - but I can get a good Femtocell connection using just 1mw."
He was citing radiated power, not battery drain. But because mobile phones will operate at lower power indoors, callers will get 50 percent more talk time than they would outside.
A view aired repeatedly at the conference was that people would resist having a base station in their homes because of health fears, particularly following the Panorama Wifi radiation scare.
Peter Jarich, wireless research director at Current Analysis, who used the above cartoon (top left) in an amusing presentation, pointed out that the programme had been much debunked but "it makes no difference if the danger is perceived to be real."
Another potential problem is what was called the "bus queue effect". If 20 people standing in a queue all start using their mobile phones, the machines could spend so much time negotiating with a nearby femtocell that refuses their calls, that they could end up not getting through on the macro network.
On one usage model, which will not be implemented in Europe, femtocells could put through public as well as home calls – potentially eliminating the need for neighbourhood base stations.
Louis Samuel, vice president and chief technology office for Alcatel in Europe, insists that his company has solved all the major problems surrounding femtocells – though he does expect teething problems in early implementations.
He would not name UK operators planning imminent rollouts. The London conference included representatives from Orange, Telefonica 02, T-Mobile International, Carphone Warehouse, Do Co Mo Europe, and Vodaphone NL.
One chart (above left), shown by Motorola's Eric Dowek, showed what they are worried about. It shows the anticipated affect of voice-over-IP on the revenues of fixed and mobile operators.
Posted by Clive Akass on July 4, 2007 | Permalink
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