Verizon Wireless does femtocells too – CDMA femtocells for Verizon customers later this year
By Will Park on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 2:30 PM PST In Announcements, Services, Verizon
Having a hard time “hearing me now” inside a building, especially your home? Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless has your back. The No. 2 US wireless carrier has announced that they intend to enhance indoor wireless coverage for their Verizon network by making femtocells available to customers later this year.
Femtocells are small-scale cellular base stations, typically designed for use in residential or small business environments. They connect handsets to a particular service provider’s network via broadband. The Verizon femtocell will route voice calls through a wired or wireless router and over your broadband data connection – a much cheaper alternative than expensive infrastructure build-outs.
Sprint (NYSE: S) is already trialling their own femtocell solution, and is expected to cost $50 after subscription subsidies. We’re looking for Verizon to offer their femtocell at a similar price point.
[Via: jkOnTheRun]
Its not really a cell tower, its VOIP system. All it will do is that when you are home instead of using the cell towers for voice data transmission, it will use your internet connection and will make it a Voice over IP call. Cheap but nice concept and will save a lot of money for the cellular companies.
How i know if you ask, “EE’s rule the world”
Right, they’re definitely not cell towers, but they are cellular base stations
It would be nice if the femtocell concept could be adapted to work as a signal booster of sorts, but I guess that is just asking too much.
And, EE do rule the world – at least our tech-world
Will:
I am far from being a “techie”, but from what I’ve read about femtocells, they do act as essentially a signal booster. They provide enough signal strenth indoors for those, like me, who are lucky to sustain even one “bar” inside my condo. The information I’ve been able to glean strongly suggests that femtocells will “fix” the problem of poor reception inside buildings. For a frustrated consumer like me, for $10-$15 per month, I won’t have to purchase and install a $500 cellular amplifier/repeater system which may or may not work given the geography of my neighborhood.
I just purchased Sprint’s Airave. At first blush, I really like it. I have a decent Internet connection (Comcast with Speedboost) and installing it is a snap. Just plug it into the wall and your wireless router. The unit even has a GPS chip built in so it can pick up your location and for LBS based applications and E911, it was within 20 meters according to Google Earth. I even tried walking outside and there is a momentary drop off, a beep and then you are on the cellular network. (I was not expecting ANY transition so the momentary blip is just a minor inconvenience.)
Joe
Some food for thought: I haven’t done a lot of testing, but the unit says it can support 3 simultaneous calls. I know that before I got the Speed Boost option, one Vonage call would sometimes sound horrible. I suggest that anyone putting one of these in should also have a router that supports QoS and then identify the Airave as having higher priority than the computer streaming a video or playing CoD.