Femto cells are about putting a tiny cellular base station inside the home or office (technically, indoor office cells are usually called “picocells”). Indoors, the phone roams to the femtocell, and makes calls as normal - but they are connected over the user's broadband service.

Advantages:

• Any phone can roam to them because they use the same GSM or 3G networks. This is significant: one of the selling points of converged services is the promise of cheaper calls using the subscribers' own broadband networks - a saving which is currently wiped out by the high price of dual-mode phones.
• Femtocells should also slow down the operator's worst problem: churn. Service providers can send users a femtocell when they threaten to dump the service because of poor 3G coverage in their homes. If the operator manages to get everyone in a shared house or a family onto a femtocell, it's even harder for the whole family to move its mobile contracts - at the same time - to a different femto provider.

Disadvantages:

• It uses the customer's own broadband and phone line - so it's sitting alongside cheap or free alternatives. All this means operators will have to effectively give away femtocells.
• The radio link in cell phones is strongly asymmetric - the radio element in a femtocell can't be simply re-used from a handset.
• Femtocells may make it harder for customers to change provider, but the cost of the femtocell has to be added in, so they increase the cost to the operator when a customer churns away to another service provider.
• It is quite complicated as well customers will roam between macro cells outside the house and femtocells inside. But this means the radio coverage of the femtocell - managed by the customer - must be coordinated with that of the macrocell. And the operator can look forward to costly customer support calls, when the user unplugs the femto, breaks it or causes interference to it, - or when the femto fails because the customer's broadband goes down.

Other burning questions in this regard are as follows

• Will mobile operators charge the same for minutes via femto cellular devices?
• Will enterprises buy femto cellular devices like Wi-Fi access points to extend cellular coverage?
• How do you stop your neighbors from using your femto cellular device and the associated broadband bandwidth?
• And how much are you willing to pay for a device that lets you use mobile phones in your house?
• Homes are going to be full of other kit including Wi-Fi access points and broadband gateways, and most households will have phones from multiple operators, and what if there are more than one Femtos in one house?

For Further info visit http://www.techworld.com/

Contribution: Ashish Chandrashekhar