Last week saw the UK launch of the femtocell, the small box in the home that links to the broadband network and provides a mini basestation for 3G phones to improve coverage and provide some interesting new services.
This is an areas where the UK has a leading position, with two startups - ip.access in Cambridge and Ubiquisys in Swindon - leading the way, as well as picoChip in Bath providing silicon for the vast majority of the 3G femtocell rollouts.
But there is now significant competition, both from new divisions of companies such as Pirelli, established telecoms companies such as Sagem and Alcatel-Lucent (who have joined together to provide the Vodafone femtocell) and large players such as Huawei of China which ships equipment to 60m broadband subscribers and is a major supplier to the Chinese mobile operators.
All these companies came together at the Femtocell Forum recently, where Japanese operator Softbank announced it would be switching off its 2G mobile phone signal next March, and relying on femtocells for improving the 3G network, making them even more important.
But energy costs, both to build and run mobile networks, are increasingly important. Operators use a phenomenal amount of power, 400GW - or 200,000 tons of carbon - and over half of this is on the radio access. While this seems a lot, this equates to 25kg per user, or the same as an hour's drive on the motorway.
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The Mobile VCE (Virtual Centre of Excellence) research consortium in the UK is looking at the whole energy chain, from the carbon cost of building the base stations, macrocells and femtocells, to the running costs.
Looking at Green Radio at the Wireless2.0 conference in Bristol last week, it's not clear whether femtocells are a lower energy solution, even though they provide a way of filling in the network at lower cost for the operators.
"It's about using Green radio as an enabler to reduce operating expenses and total carbon footprint," said Prof Steve McLaughlin of the University of Edinburgh, leading the research. "85% of the energy is used in the manufacturing and just 15% in operation."
This is going to have a significant impact on the design and manufacture of femtocells. If, as expected, the market takes off with millions of devices, this is going to have a huge energy cost.
This will also challenge some of the suppliers. One major femtocell maker is using a macro basestation chip rather than an optimised chip, burning power and money to get a foothold in the market. While this may be possible in its large home market, shipping into Europe and the US with high power consumption may not meet coming energy requirements.
But this will also be a challenge for the home grown suppliers to provide low energy solutions, both in operations and also in the manufacturing to provide truly green radio. And this will help the UK expertise and innovation drive green radio technologies and processes into the industry.
Nick Flaherty has been covering technology since 1990 and is based in Bristol, where he co-founded the SiliconSouthWest network. During that time he has worked for most of the electronics magazines and newspapers in the UK and several in Europe and the US, covering all areas of the industry. He blogs at www.flaherty.co.uk.
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