Wireless Stuff By Joe Walsh

This blog is dedicated to all things wireless. Postings will cover new gadgets and gizmos, services and plans, cool stuff and useful stuff. Today’s post is about femtocells.

Even in today’s wireless world, there are still large portions of the country that do not receive decent wireless signals. Every carrier has coverage gaps like potholes in the wireless fabric. They try to fix and fill them to the best of their ability, but the truth is that it is not economically feasible to eliminate them entirely. Even my sister, who lives in downtown Manhattan, frequently has spotty coverage on her Verizon Wireless phone from inside of  her apartment.  Enter the femtocell…

Sounding like something out of Austin Powers, a femtocell can actually be thought of as a small cell tower in your house or office. They look like a WiFi router but cross a Voice Over IP (VoIP) phone and wireless service. Do they work? “You betcha” I tested a Sprint Airave by Samsung. This femtocell allows for up to three simultaneous calls and up to 50 phones to be connected to it at any time. In testing in areas that have extremely little coverage we went from intermittent signal strength on a Blackberry Pearl to five bars of coverage. Calls sounded crystal clear both on incoming and outgoing calls when before, it was hard to make calls and when you did, they lost coverage during the call frequently.

With the Airave, when you placed a call that was being transmitted through the femtocell, you would hear a short beep after pressing the send button. Calls transferred to the cellular network relatively well if the airave lost network connectivity or if you left your house and moved out of the range of the Airave. The only instance that did network at all was when the power was cut to the Airave. In those cases, calls were dropped immediately. My version supported data in the 1xRTT mode, the slower of the two data modes offered by Sprint. This meant that data throughput was approximately 100K vs. the typical 500-700K of EVDO.

Basic setup of these devices is relatively straight forward. You plug the unit into the wall for power, connect it to your router via an Ethernet cable and typically attach a GPS antenna (more on why this is important in my next post). After a few moments, if your wireless carrier has provisioned your service properly, you will be ready to make a call. Now, when you are in your house and you place or receive calls on your mobile phone, the calls are actually carried over your broadband Internet connection.

If you have any technical prowess at all, you will want to adjust your router’s Quality of Service (QoS) settings to ensure that your calls are crystal clear even if you are downloading a large file on your computer. I use the purchased the Linksys 600N router specifically because I use VoIP services and it has good QoS functionality built into the router. If you do not have your router manuals handy, try a Google search with model number and “QoS”. If your router allows it, use the MAC address of the femtocell (likely listed on a stick on the bottom of the femtocell near the serial number or ESN) and set it for the highest priority. This will not stop you from downloading your files, but it will ensure that packets going to and from your phone calls are sent first.

One last setup step, if you live in a crowded area (like an apartment in New York City), you will want to limit the femtocell to your own phones so that your neighbors will not be using your broadband connections to make their calls. Look at the instructions of your femtocell to determine how to limit service to only select phones. If you live in the suburbs with well spaced out houses or the country, this may not be an issue for you.

Right now, Sprint and T-Mobile are the only two carriers who are offering femtocells. Verizon Wireless is rumored to be deploying a device similar to the Airave in late January 2009.  The cost for the Sprint device was $99 and the service plan I selected was $4.99 per month. An optional plan that was $20 per month did not count calls made while connected to the Airave towards plan minutes no matter the time of day. What was not clear, however, from the Sprint reps is if this was any call placed on the Airave or only calls made from the registered phone numbers on the account that purchased the Airave.

This entry was posted on January 26, 2009 at 1:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.