Femtocells and the end of notspots

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Poor mobile phone reception is a constant irritation for business people working both in and out-of-office. Known as ‘notspots’, these are areas with little or no coverage.

However, the annoyance of crucial call signals breaking up or difficult conference calls with colleagues on mobiles could soon be at an end thanks to a new device called a femtocell which allows phone users to boost their signal using their ethernet connection.

With devices unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, this new technology is being pioneered by British company picoChip.

In simple terms, femtocells are mobile phone base stations which make use of specialist microchips to boost a mobile phone signal by piggybacking on a user’s broadband connection. The devices also route mobile phone calls wirelessly.

Semiconductor and femtocell pioneer picoChip, based in Bath, was the first company to launch a femtocell modem and create many of the microchip processors which lie at the heart of femtocell devices. Much as Intel sells chips to PC makers, picoChip sell its chips to the companies who make femtocell products such as Alcatel-Lucent, ip.Access, Ubiquisys or Sagem.

There are three types of femtocells that will be available this year. Class 1 femtocell devices are aimed at private and small business users, with four to eight users. These book-sized black boxes work simply by being plugged into the ethernet and a mains power source, rather like a wi-fi device, to amplify reception within a 50-yard radius.

The end of notspots?

Class 2 femtocells are aimed at large organisations and even hotels – much like enterprise wi-fi, they offer PBX (private branch exchange) integration to provide all the telephone features modern businesses need from call forwarding to conference calls.

“The idea of the enterprise femtocell is if you’re in a company, you can get rid of the fixed lines phone you use today or the cordless phones that some people have and just use your mobile phone," Rupert Baines, head of marketing picoChip’s, explains.

"You’ll still be able to forward calls really easily, do conference calls and all the features you expect in a company phone network but your mobile phone reception would become really, really good so you get five bars coverage, crystal clear voice, and streaming fast data.”

Femtocells also have the advantage of working with existing mobile phones with no need to upgrade handsets.

Finally, class 3 metro and rural femtocells will shortly be available which can be used be deployed by network carriers as part of their network like any other base station. These are the femtocells which are likely to banish ‘notspots’ or areas of poor 3G coverage yet they remain invisible to the business user.

As Baines notes: “If you’re waiting at Paddington Station and you used BT Cloud Wi-Fi, you don’t know where that box is, you’re just using their service and it’s the same with this kind of femtocell. All you will know is that you’re walking down a street and your 3G phone works better.”

Volume woes

The head of O2 phone network, Ronan Dunne recently told the Financial Times he was disappointed with O2’s network performance in London which had become overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

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