Singapore’s StarHub launches world’s first commercial 3G femtocell service
StarHub’s ‘Home Zone’ femtocell is currently limited to the first 200 subscribers, so it’s perhaps more of a market trial than a full commercial launch. It’s similar in principle to Sprint’s trial of the AIRAVE, which was initially limited to a couple of US cities. But Home Zone is actually being sold to real consumers paying real money, so StarHub does deserve the headlines. Here are the highlights:
- Launch follows a femtocell trial started in May 2008
- Currently only available to the first 200 subscribers who sign up
- ‘Home Zone’ supports all 3G mobile services
- Supports up to four simultaneous calls over a single ‘Home Zone’ connection
- A pre-recorded voice message “You’re on the Home Zone service” is played before each outgoing call
- Some phones display “StarHub Home Zone”, “SGP-06″ or 52506″ as the network name
- Subscribers call 1633 to change their access control whitelist
- The femtocell equipment is supplied by Huawei
- StarHub will ”realign MaxOnline bandwidth” to prioritise femtocell voice traffic in future
Tariff:
- ‘Home Zone’ AP is offered on free loan (i.e. still owned by StarHub)
- S$16.05 (US$10.62) per month with a 1-year contract
- Minimum subscription for Home Zone service is 3 months
- Local calls & SMS in the home are free, but not international calls
- Mobile data, MMS and downloads are charged at standard rates
- Only available to StarHub’s existing broadband (MaxOnline) subscribers
- Only available to StarHub’s post-paid mobile subscribers
- No hand-in from the macro network to the femtocell
- Access control white-list is limited to four numbers
- Only for residential use (no office use, on pain of severe consequences!)
- No itemised billing of the femto calls
- FAQ warns about potential faster battery drain
- Femtocell gets very hot during operation - FAQ reassures customers that this is normal.
“The beauty of the 3G femtocell technology is that all 3G-enabled phones are supported and customers do not need to purchase special handsets to take advantage of it,” said Mr Anil Nihalani, Head of Mobile and Communications at StarHub.
“SFR says it’s too early to communicate on detailed commercial offers. However it is possible to imagine all the possibilities that this technology would open up: like cheaper or free calls when the subscriber calls from the femto, or a community-based development like FON: open up your femto to others, and use other femtos for free. Femtos would also be ideal to bring 3G coverage in areas with poor or no coverage. However the regulator will certainly have comments on such a peculiar use of 3G licenses, while associations fighting the installation of large antennas will certainly be incensed by the multiplication of small ones.”
[Thanks to Thierry Samama for the French translation - never my best subject at school.]
Gartner says we’ve reached the peak of the femto hype cycle
“At present, Gartner assesses femtocells to be at the peak of inflated expectations,” said Foong King Yew, Gartner’s research director for telecommunications. Gartner invented the famous technology hype cycle, which predicts a period of disappointed expectations following the early hype surrounding any new technology innovation. In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Foong said it would take another two to five years for femtocells to mature, but that they are “a promising technology over the longer term”.
EU issues power consumption guidelines for femtocells
Version 3 of the EU ‘Code of Conduct on Energy Consumption of Broadband Equipment’ mentions femtocells for the first time. It recommends that femtocells should consume less than 9 Watts in 2009 and less than 8 Watts in 2011. This shouldn’t present too big a challenge; for example the ip.access Oyster 3G femtocell is already at about 8 Watts, and Ubiquisys says its ZoneGate femtocell also already complies with the 2011 target.
How does 900 MHz spectrum re-farming impact the femtocell business case?
Ram Krishnan asks a good question here. If operators clear out some of their GSM 900 MHz spectrum and use it for 3G, as Elisa has done in Finland, will there be any need for femtocells? 900 MHz propagates further than 2.1 GHz, so operators can save costs by using fewer basestations to cover more area. This makes it easier for an operator to extend its network coverage in rural areas, which means there should be fewer subscribers who need a femtocell due to lack of macro network coverage in their region. On the other hand, I believe it’s true that 900 MHz signals don’t penetrate buildings any better than 2.1 GHz, so it shouldn’t follow that femtocells are unnecessary. And an even more important argument for femtocells is that they add capacity to the network, which is not solved by re-farming 900 MHz spectrum.
Epitiro recommends voice quality testing
Voice quality test equipment maker Epitiro has published a Femtocell Deployment Guide, showing the performance of IPsec traffic in real-world situations. “Cellular operators need to understand that residential broadband service can vary significantly by time of day, day of week and by type of traffic,” said JP Curley, Epitiro’s CTO. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Curley recommends that operators should deploy, erm, voice quality test equipment (so that they can measure and monitor voice quality for their femtocell customers), and that they should consider negotiating Service Level Agreements with ISPs. Fair enough – this may well be a good idea. In practice, I haven’t yet seen any complaints about voice quality from femtocell customers (in fact, most of the AIRAVE reviews suggest that voice quality is better than on the macro network, despite the fact that Sprint has no control over the residential broadband connection). Maybe we’ve just been lucky so far?
Airvana sees consumer demand for femtocells
Like other femtocell vendors, Airvana is getting inquiries from consumers wanting to buy femtocells. This interesting Femto Hub posting exposes some commonly held misconceptions. Top of the list: femtocells bypass the wireless carrier’s network. Second: femtocells provide a home broadband connection (nope, that’s the ‘dongle dock’).
Femtocells – already a legacy!
I love the reference to “Legacy FAP” in figure 1 of this article on femtocell security issues. Presumably those are the ones using the ‘legacy Iu-h standard’, which hasn’t quite been finished yet 
In other news…
- Percello and BroadLight announce partnership
- Femtocells will help offload “network-inefficient” applications, says Think Femtocell
- 4 or 16 channels for the enterprise? (16, no question.)
- Femtocells should be cheap enough and reliable enough to replace landlines
- Femtocell business case? It’s the termination rates, stupid!
- Continuous Computing explains how femto management works
- picoChip ranks #17 in Deloitte’s EMEA Technology Fast 500
- Aricent’s Sudhir Tangri forecasts LTE femtocells will be big (not literally)
- Yoof use mobile Internet! Anyone find that surprising?
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: 900 MHz re-farming, Airvana, Aricent, BroadLight, Continuous Computing, Epitiro, EU, Femtocell, femtocells, Gartner, Home Zone, Huawei, hype cycle, ip.access, Oyster 3G, Percello, picoChip, power consumption, SFR, StarHub, Ubiquisys, ZoneGate
Dear Andy & ip.access,
Regarding the post from your blog on my article on femtocell security, let me clarify my use of the term legacy. I did not mean to imply that the 3GPP standard or existing access points are “in the past” or outdated. What I meant is that the IuH or a proprietary CDMA architecture uses legacy MSCs and voice infrastructure to provide mobile communication services. This is in contrast to a SIP-based next generation or IMS voice services infrastructure.
Femtocells – already a legacy!
I love the reference to “Legacy FAP” in figure 1 of this article on femtocell security issues. Presumably those are the ones using the ‘legacy Iu-h standard’, which hasn’t quite been finished yet
Thanks, Kevin
I think your article is clear, and my comment wasn’t intended as a serious criticism. Sorry for making a big thing of this – the diagram just made me smile
Andy
Actually, according to Elisa, indoor coverage is another key benefit of UMTS900. They do penetrate buildings better than 2100MHz
Hi Ram
Thanks for the clarification. So if an operator deploys cell sites at 900 MHz, then in-building coverage will improve compared to using the same cell density at 2.1 GHz, right? But it seems like the main idea is for the operator to save costs by deploying 900 MHz cells much more sparsely than 2.1 GHz, which presumably will have a negative impact on in-building coverage. Can the operator get both benefits at the same time, or is it a choice of either (1) fewer cell sites or (2) better in-building coverage?
This raises an interesting question: just how much worse is propagation into buildings at 2.1 GHz compared to 900 MHz?
The power that an omni-directional antenna (mandatory on a handset) can extract from the electromagnetic energy transmitted by a cellular base station reduces as the square of frequency. So, inherently, a handset at 2100 MHz will receive only about 20% of the power that it could at 900 MHz for the same base station power, all else being equal – or 7 dB less. What factors about a building could make the situation worse at higher frequency?
Building walls reflect some power away from the building and attenuate what passes through because of loss mechanisms in the material – exacerbated by moisture in brick or concrete. Such loss increases slowly with frequency. Reinforcing mesh in concrete reflects energy at frequencies where the wavelength is longer than the mesh size; but gets more and more transparent at shorter wavelengths. So depending on the material mix we would expect to see different results, with penetration getting either worse or better with increasing frequency. Other mechanisms, such as multiple reflections from multi-layer materials, can also result in attenuation reducing with increasing frequency.
Windows reflect some energy and attenuate what passes through, especially if they are coated to reflect and absorb the sun’s heat. These loss mechanisms get rather worse with increasing frequency.
On the other hand, window apertures let much more power through when their size is of the same order as or larger than the “Fresnel zone” size, which is directly related to wavelength. Wavelength at 900 MHz is about 33 cm, whereas at 2100 MHz it is more like 14 cm, so more power gets through at higher frequency. At higher frequency power can also get in through slot-like apertures which have length longer than a wavelength or so.
We all know that LW and MW radios perform worse indoors; whilst FM radio at 100 MHz is significantly better. Penetration at 200 MHz (where DAB works) is better still.
One of the problems is that the built environment is far too complex to draw many general conclusions. For example, for a building with others close by, apparent penetration at 900 MHz might be better than 2100 MHz on the lower floors because of worse scattering at the higher frequencies by neighbouring buildings; whereas on higher floors it could be the other way round where the scattering is less and the windows let more signal through at higher frequency.
A study by the US NTIA published in 1992 that aggregated results from many studies concluded that in commercial buildings the attenuation was lowest at 60 MHz and worsens at 1.7 dB/decade of frequency above that. For houses the “best” frequency was 200 MHz and the exponent 3.1 dB/decade. This would suggest that in offices the situation at 2100 MHz is about 0.6 dB worse than 900 MHz, or about 1 dB for houses. In other words, they are about the same. Offices may be a bit worse now as the use of metallised glass has increased, houses probably haven’t changed much. The inherently lower performance of handset antennas at higher frequency could easily trump any building effects.
So if an operator uses the “better” propagation characteristics of 900 MHz to build larger cells in lower density areas, the end result will be much the same actually inside buildings near the cell edge and the “coverage” case for femtocells still applies. If on the other hand he uses existing urban cell sites to serve high-traffic areas using the 900 MHz spectrum, femtocells should give just the same in-building benefit as at the higher frequency. In any case, the arguments for using femtocells for good indoor data performance and to offer attractive tariff packages are just the same.