Would you pay for a femto cell? Probably
Friday, January 29, 2010 by Stewart Baines
As well as all of the wonderful corporate blogs and customer publications that we manage for industry leaders like Orange Business Services, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks, Airwave, TelecityGroup and Vodafone, we also still like to get our hands dirty with the nitty gritty of the technology businesses. Writing white papers is never easy but does give us an opportunity to really get our teeth into some pretty cool technology. In the last couple of months, we’ve written reports on M2M telemedicine, M2M applications, Cloud Computing and enterprise perimter security. The latest is a report on femto cells (or small cells) for Alcatel-Lucent. Bell Labs performed an extensive five country consumer survey (and I mean extensive) on attitudes to small cells and mobile broadband. So while pundits may argue mobile operators should be paying the costs for network in-fill, a surprising number of people are prepared to buy their own femto cell if it provides an significantly improved mobile broadband experience. I know I would.
If you’re interested in what people would do with a femto cell at home, check out this white paper that we wrote for Alcatel-Lucent: Alcatel-Lucent small cells whitepaper
Andy says on February 3rd, 2010 at 2:50 pm :
I suspect it will all depend how the femtocells are sold….. The Vodafone deal in the UK is expensive & you get nothing in return except a lock-in to Vodafone!
Installation was a nightmare – it took about 2 months to get working – Mobile companies need to learn data skills which they clearly do not have, big learning curve for them – in the end I had to change my ISP to one that supported the protocol used by Vodafone – very poor device selection on Vodafone’s behalf as the restricted capabilities of their femtocell must be causing a major support headache!
There are also quality of service issues – I have found that even on an 8Mb broadband connection I get voice quality corruption when an online backup is running at the same time – other VoIP devices such as my Vonage phone do not appear to be so sensitive to network congestion.
Overall a nice idea but on the basis of experience to date – you are probably better standing near a window to get a signal.
Andy