The magic of the MicroCell (and WiFi)
Telephony Online’s Kevin Fitchard believes that AT&T’s 3G MicroCell could become “another pillar in AT&T’s dual-network strategy” – WiFi and cellular, that is. AT&T has become increasingly reliant on WiFi to offload mobile data traffic from its 3G network, with iPhones now connecting to WiFi automatically in AT&T hotspots, causing a 66% leap in the number of hotspot connections.
John Stankey, president and CEO of AT&T Operations, explained this in his keynote speech at SUPERCOMM: “We’re…focusing on how we make WiFi and licensed spectrum a more seamless experience for customers…You’re going to see micro and macro in terms of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. This is a key architecture element we’re all going to have to come to grips with.”
Telephony Online points to an earlier interview with Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility, suggesting that the 3G MicroCell is also set to become part of this offload strategy. “It’s not going to be one thing; it will be a combination of things: taking fiber closer to the home, Wi-Fi and femtocells. A combination of all of those is going to help us manage bandwidth and provide a great experience to our customers no matter where they connect,” says de la Vega.
So is it WiFi for hotspots and femtocells for the home? There would be some logic to this approach from AT&T’s perspective. It’s one thing for a carrier to offload mobile data traffic onto its own managed WiFi network, but quite another to encourage its customers to switch to their own private WiFi networks at home, where the carrier retains no involvement whatsoever.
Alternatively, will WiFi take on femtocells and win?
Picking up on the WiFi / femto theme, Stacey Higginbottom at GigaOm asks “who needs femtocells if we have WiFi?” According to Stacey we’ve seen WiFi take on femtocells in the enterprise and win (when did that happen?), so as Wi-Fi gets embedded in more and more phones femtocells will become unnecessary. But most observers are now seeing WiFi and femtocells as complementary. For example, Senza Fili’s Monica Paolini expresses this more balanced view on the Cisco Community site.
3G MicroCell gets 9.5 out of 10 Stammys!
Renowned tech blogger Paul Stamatiou gave the AT&T 3G MicroCell a review this week. He had some problems getting a GPS location fix, which meant that activation took a long time, but apart from this the review is very positive:
- “5 bars in every room and no degradation of call quality while moving about”
- “Call quality is as good as I have ever heard from an iPhone 3GS”
- “I have not experienced any degradation of call quality, even when I was soaking up tons of my bandwidth”
- “I gladly paid for the MicroCell out of my own wallet, which allowed me to dump my $26/month Vonage VoIP setup and not have to deal with having two phone numbers.”
- “Setup was a huge pain, but I can forget about that for the great service and call quality it provides.”
Overall, the AT&T 3G MicroCell was awarded 9.5 out of 10 Stammys.
Also this week, The Apple Blog updated its MicroCell review and reported some teething problems with service outages (attributed to firmware updates). It seems that the problems are now fixed, except that calls to India are not the highest quality (which might not necessarily be the MicroCell’s fault).
More on China Unicom’s 3G Inn femtocell
ABI’s Aditya Kaul suggests that China Unicom is “looking at a massive [femtocell] rollout”, ramping up towards end of next year. He believes it’s not a coincidence that the operator’s ‘3G Inn’ femtocell announcement has coincided with the (WiFi-less) Chinese iPhone launch, and points out that, unlike the AT&T 3G MicroCell and the Vodafone Access Gateway, it will be harder to track the 3G Inn’s progress via the blogs and Twitter due to the great Chinese firewall!
Vodafone Access Gateway & WiFi
Last week we heard about problems with Total Telecom’s trial of the Vodafone Access Gateway interfering with WiFi. This week the problem is resolved, but only at the cost of moving the WiFi Access Point and the femtocell 6 feet apart. It seems the trouble was probably caused by a poor quality spectrum filter in the WiFi unit. (Fortunately this is not a complicated thing to get right, so those anticipated integrated femto / WiFi home gateways will not need to be 6 feet wide.)
The Register says SpiderCloud Wireless is stressing that its new E-RAN offering is not a femtocell play. Apparently this is because the E-RAN is fully integrated with the network and can therefore support two-way handover. If this is indeed SpiderCloud’s claim, they may be surprised to discover that femtocells are also fully integrated with the network and can support two-way handover (although not yet in a standardised way).
Meanwhile, Peter Jarich questions the viability of an offering that relies on wireless carriers as a channel into large enterprises, and Unstrung regrets that the company has nothing to do with Spiderpig.
Wireless Week sceptical about femtocells
Probably as a result of too much hype in the early days, there’s now a common misconception that femtocells have been around for ages and that that consumer adoption has been disappointing. For example, Wireless Week comments: “femtocells…have simply failed to thrive.” But the reality is that femtocells are still a new technology. Operators are only just beginning to deploy femtocells commercially and have not yet started actively marketing them.
In other news…
- Finding the right small-cell architecture for 4G.
- Imagine if every femtocell came equipped with a 1 TB hard drive…
- How femtocell billing works.
- Femtocells and iPhone Moms (er, Mums).
- Carriers must not overlook the importance of successfully marketing femtocells.
- 3 UK says data now represents 94% of its network traffic.
- Dual mode is ‘in’, but Nokia loses ground in the WiFi handset market.
- Smartphones to overtake feature phones by 2012.
- MiFi sales disappointing.
- Interview with Dave Gross of GWT and Shlomo Gadot of Percello.
- Tatara selects CCPU.
- SafeNet explains femto security.
- Oops, lost one…
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: 3G Inn, AT&T 3G Microcell, China Unicom, Femtocell, femtocells, femtocells & WiFi, SpiderCloud, Vodafone Access Gateway | Leave a Comment »






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