Users say how Sprint’s Airave could be improved
Airave users commenting on the Engadget site say that Sprint should remove the monthly fee (e.g. “I don’t mind buying the box and maybe even a one time fee for setup, but monthly recurring charges to fix bad signal issues? Hmmm… Nope.” Others, not understanding the legal constraints, want the location lock removed so they can get cheap calls from their femtocell when abroad. Finally, several users said that they’d like the Airave to support EVDO data services. Sprint’s Russ McGuire hinted that data is important to Sprint’s femto plans during a conference panel: “What can you do as your network traffic begins to grow to manage the costs of carrying that? You can move traffic off the network. So one of the things we’ve done is introduce a femtocell product to get that traffic off of the radio network.”
Femtocells – pretty as a picture
Motorola is looking at different packaging options for femtocells, for example integrating them into picture frames. This would provide a handy config screen for managing access control lists, and would encourage people to put the femtocell in a central location in the home. But won’t it require an ugly Ethernet cable? Apparently not – Motorola says the picture frame “eliminates the need to keep the femtocell physically tethered to a broadband connection” (but it’s not exactly clear how it does this).
Number of basestations to increase dramatically
ABI Research says that the number of base stations will increase from 3.6 million in 2007 to 5.7 million by 2013. (Elsewhere, ABI has forecasted an installed base of 97 million femtocells by 2013, so we’ll be just over the 100 million mark all together.) The key driver will be increased data usage, requiring more densely packed cell sites.
4G femto – the macrocell is dead, long live the network
picoChip CTO Doug Pulley argues that the brunt of network traffic, especially for 4G networks, can no longer be carried by the traditional macrocell basestation arrangement, but must travel via fine-grained networks of much smaller cells. The same theme is picked up by Stacey Higginbotham on the GigaOM blog this week: “I doubt that wireless carriers will abandon towers altogether, but using femtocells to deploy 4G to customers who want to sign up for the service before a citywide deployment sounds like it could make sense.”
More femtocell articles & blogs…
- Femtocells: hype or hope?
- Femtocells could drive new business models
- Potted femto summary
- Another happy Airave customer
In other news…
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: ABI, Acmepacket, Airave, Continuous Computing, Epitiro, Femtocell, femtocells, Genband, ip.access, Motorola, NextPoint, picoChip, Sprint
