One is their ease of use: subscribers will be expected to set femtocells up themselves.
Femtocells are indeed reminiscent of personal computers, in that they threaten to disrupt the industry.
Another is interference: too many femtocells in close proximity could interfere with each other, or with existing mobile networks.
It also may explain why femtocells have so far mostly been pushed by start-ups, such as Airvana, ip.access and Ubiquisys.
The idea was to knit together an ad-hoc network of small, low-powered cells femtocells which would be connected to a telecoms network.
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But in new networks femtocells are likely to play a more central role, to the detriment of big, costly radio towers.
Femtocells are not expected to become common until 2009 at the earliest.
Picochip is the market leader in femtocells, which redirect mobile-phone signals through landlines, boosting coverage in remote areas and prolonging battery life.
Wi-Fi will remain big, which is good for Cisco ( CSCO) and others in that business, and femtocells have begun to gain traction.
By economising on scarce mobile spectrum, femtocells might prove most useful in managing the rapid growth of internet and video traffic to smartphones and tablet computers.
The problem with femtocells until now, Cooper noted, has been interference between local base stations and faraway cellular towers when the two sources broadcast to a phone simultaneously.
Femtocells are provided by operators to provide a signal indoors in remote areas where the cell tower may be too far to transmit a signal inside the home.
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Instead, Cooper argued that mobile networks should be using access point base stations, or femtocells: broadband-connected local cell stations that beam cell signals over focused areas inside of buildings.
Given these advantages, analysts expect femtocells to spread quickly.
Yes, we will simultaneously be deploying lots of new Wi-Fi nodes and femtocells (little mobile nodes in offices and homes), which help achieve greater coverage and capacity, but we still need more macrocells.
For those who aren't familiar, small cell base stations like femtocells and picocells have been around for years, helping to boost cell signal in small areas by hooking into a local wired network.
Residential or enterprise small cells, sometimes referred to as femtocells, are designed for deployment in residential or office settings to connect anywhere from 8 to 64 users within a radius of a few hundred feet.
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