Land Lines, Away
For small businesses, femtocells will make it that much easier to cut the cord entirely, since they can get reliable operation indoors and looser constraints on monthly voice minutes. For instance, the Sprint plan provides unlimited voice calling after paying a monthly charge fee of $4.99 for the Airave femtocell service and $10 for a single-line unlimited calling plan. The femtocell access point costs $99.99. We'll have to wait and see what the AT&T and Verizon plans look like, but we expect them to be similar.
High-speed data networks such as HSPA and LTE provide the greatest throughput speeds when users don't have to share the radio with a lot of other users, and when there is a high-quality radio signal. Femtocells can provide both, although the location of the femtocell(s) in a building will be important. Moreover, the current typical 3G caps of 5 GB per month are unlikely to apply to femtocells. This makes using your laptop modem at work or at home much more attractive, and further facilitates mobile-broadband always-connected operation.
The benefits will apply to voice-centric mobile phones, smartphones, mobile-Internet devices, and laptops. Best yet, femtocell works with existing devices, and its low-power operation will extend their battery life. Operators benefit by offloading data-intensive traffic from their macro networks, meaning fewer macro cells are needed.
However, there are complications that operators and vendors have to overcome before femtocells really become prevalent.
Small Cells, Big Headaches
Management is perhaps the biggest issue that operators will face as enterprise femto networks come online. Operators today manage tens of thousands of cell sites, but femtocells will number in the millions, and each one will need to be provisioned correctly and given ongoing firmware updates. Femtocells must be simple enough that an average user can install them -- and as Wi-Fi has shown, this is a challenge in itself.
Operators will have to control where customers operate the femtocell, in case a user moves to a different city where the operator doesn't have a license.
Interference management for femtocells also will be complex, including femtocell-to-femtocell interference in adjacent buildings, and femtocell-to-macrocell interference. Operators will have to decide whether to dedicate radio channels to femtocells in a coverage area, or to use the same frequencies as the WAN.
Finally, although businesses will likely tolerate higher prices than consumers, operators will need to offer enterprise femtocell networks at a reasonable price point—possibly in the $500 range, similar to enterprise Wi-Fi APs.
A small business using consumer-oriented equipment may be happy to switch femtocell access points if it changes carriers, but a larger business will be making a significant commitment to a specific cellular operator, with potentially a large number of femtocell APs throughout the organization. In contrast, a Wi-Fi approach for voice delivers a more operator-independent infrastructure, although ultimately the gateways must integrate with specific operator services. Businesses will have to decide whether a femtocell plan makes more sense than a distributed antenna system (DAS) that extends the macro cellular signal into the enterprise environment. DAS is simpler, but femtocells provide higher capacity and potentially greater benefits for the cost.
Peter Rysavy is a wireless technology consultant and president of Rysavy Research.
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