Femtocells are being deployed in rural areas in Japan to provide data coverage to local users, Pete Keevil, founder and CTO of leading femtocell supplier Ubiquisys, told the Silicon South-West Wireless 2.0 conference in Bristol this morning.
Ubiquisys has shipped 60,000 femtocells and has orders for 400,000. The twin keys to femtocell were producing a 3G device and getting the price down to $100 – both of which have now been achieved.
"In Japan they’re putting a few of our femtocells in a box the size of a mini-bar fridge and sticking it on the top of a concrete pole to provide coverage in rural areas", said Keevil, "these things are handing over to each other, and they have a range of three kilometres so, with a pole every two kilometres you get seamless coverage."
The installation requires: "1 guy; 1 truck;1 hour", said Keevil. Existing cable or DSL is used for the back-haul.
Four femtocells gives 4 x 16 calls on 14.4Mbps. The network is continuously self-organising for automatic macro co-existence.
The Japanese experience shows the evolution of the femtocell usage model which started as a residential tool focussed on low-cost, simplicity and ease of use, then migrated into office LANs for Enterprise usage, and now into rural WANs.
"For an office LAN you can put in a bunch of femtocells to support a business space of any size", said Keevil, "no local controller is needed. It’s a fraction of the cost of picocells or DAS. It’s a pretty dynamic network solution."
Recently, network operator Softbank of Japan decided to give Ubiquisys femtocells to all its broadband customers. These will all be open femtocells which anyone can use. It is seen as a catalyst for widespread deployment of the devices by carriers.
"The breakthrough product was 3G, and the magic number for cost was $100 - so it would be as cheap as WiFi - though femtocell is a more complicated technology," said Keevil, "now we’re working actively with, predominantly, Taiwanese partners, and we’re ramping up production in China."
One evolution of the femtocell is to increase the number of residential users. "Now eight users is standard for residential users and they’re growing in capacity quite rapidly", said Keevil.
For the operator, a plus for the femtocell is, said Keevil: "The femtocell knows who you are, so you have a secure, trusted relationship with the network."